Prof. Dr. Michael Braungart is the scientific director of EPEA International Umweltforschung GmbH (Hamburg, Germany), which he founded in 1987, and is co-founder of McDonough Braungart Design Chemistry (MBDC) in Charlottesville, Virginia. He also co-founded the Hamburger Umwelt Insitute (HUI) in 1989. These organizations share a common set of values that embrace intelligent, aesthetic and eco-effective design and seek to optimize products within the Cradle to Cradle^® framework.

Michael Braungart has been a professor of Process Engineering at the University of Lüneburg (Germany) since 1994. Additionally, since the autumn of 2008 he has been named to hold a newly funded professorship at the Erasmus University of Rotterdam in collaboration with the TU Delft. A Cradle to Cradle^® Master class is now available.

Through these activities, Professor Braungart has developed the tools to design eco-effective products and business systems and has worked with a number of organizations and companies in a range of industries. In 2002 he accepted a visiting professorship at the Darden School of Business, lecturing on topics such as eco-efficiency and eco-effectiveness, Cradle to Cradle^® design and Intelligent Materials Pooling, and he continues to lecture at universities all over the world.