Global Lecture Series Special Edition: Choices
31 March 2026 -?How do individual choices shape our shared future? In this special edition of the Global Lecture Series, Chris Luebkeman (ETH Zurich) and Aaron Maniam (University of Oxford) reflect on how everyday decisions accumulate into long?term change, and how practising foresight can help us act with greater agency and responsibility.
Choices. Past. Present. Future.
What if every choice we make, deliberate or accidental, inherited or hard?won, quietly reshapes the world around us?
In this reflective session, we invite participants to a conversation about how individual decisions accumulate into collective futures. Drawing on a lifetime of navigating uncertainty, building bridges across disciplines, and learning to read the “weak signals” that foreshadow change, ETH Zurich’s Chris Luebkeman, longtime moderator of the Global Lecture Series, offers a candid exploration of how foresight becomes a practice rather than a prediction. He will be joined by guest speaker, Aaron Maniam, from the University of Oxford.
Rather than a summing?up, this event opens a space to consider the forces that shape us, the turning points we seldom recognise in the moment, and the surprising ways our actions expand or narrow the possibilities available to others. It is an invitation to think differently about agency, responsibility, and the futures we continuously bring into being, one choice at a time.
Join us for a special edition of the Global Lecture Series; a thoughtful, future?facing dialogue that asks not only what mattered in a 65?year journey, but what might matter next, and how each of us can help practice better futures into existence.
A special edition of the Global Lectures Series by Chris Luebkeman, with guest speaker Aaron Maniam
Date: Tuesday 31 March 2026
Time: 17:00-18:30 Lecture + Q&A; 18:30-19:30 Networking Reception
Location: HG F30 Audimax, R?mistrasse 101
Registration is required: Please click external page here to register!
Opening remarks by
- Jo?l Mesot, President, ETH Zurich
Speakers
- Chris Luebkeman, Head of the Strategic Foresight Hub, ETH Zurich
- external page Aaron Maniam, Fellow of Practice & Director, Digital Transformation Education Blavatnik School of Government, University of Oxford
Moderated by
- external page Viktoria ?sterdahl, Stakeholder Engagement & Special Projects, Office of the President, ETH Zurich
Speaker Profiles
Jo?l Mesot
Jo?l Mesot has been President of ETH Zurich since 2019 and, in this role, bears legal and political responsibility for the university. Under his leadership, ETH Zurich has intensified its policy-relevant research and deepened the dialogue with political actors both in Switzerland and internationally. Furthermore, Mesot launched various initiatives related to space, AI, cyber security and energy and initiated the establishment of an ETH Zurich 365体育官网_365体育备用【手机在线】 in Heilbronn, Germany.
Raised in Geneva, Jo?l Mesot studied physics at ETH Zurich and received his doctorate on high-temperate superconductors in 1992. He spent several years researching quantum materials in France (Institut Laue-Langevin), the US (Argonne National Laboratory), and at the Paul Scherrer Institute (PSI), where he became head of the neutron scattering laboratory in 2004. In 2008, he was elected Director of the PSI and was promoted to Full Professor at ETH Zurich. During his leadership at the PSI the X-ray free-electron laser facility SwissFel was built, among other projects.
Jo?l Mesot is a member of national and international advisory boards, including the Foundation Board of the Swiss Innovation Park and the Governing Board CREATE (Singapore). For his scientific contributions, he received the IBM Prize of the Swiss Physical Society (SPG) in 1995 and the Latsis Prize of ETH Zurich in 2002.
Chris Luebkeman
Chris Luebkeman is Head of the Strategic Foresight Hub in the Office of the President at ETH Zurich. In all of his collaborations, he intertwines practical optimism, insatiable curiosity, and a profound commitment to the planet. Chris' career to date has spanned various professions and locations. His path led him to Vanderbilt, Cornell and ETH Zurich, among others. Prior to his role as Head of Foresight at ETH Zurich, he worked at the global engineering consultancy Arup in London, where he led the research and development group and later founded the foresight, innovation and incubation teams.
Dr Aaron Maniam
Dr Maniam is a Fellow of Practice at the Blavatnik School of Government. His work focuses on issues connecting technology, public policy and public administration. He teaches on the School’s Master of Public Policy and executive education programmes, and convenes its digital 'thematic cluster', bringing together scholarship and practice on digital issues. He co-chairs the World Economic Forum’s Global Future Council on GovTech and Digital Public Infrastructure and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD’s) global expert panel on strategic foresight. He is also Senior Fellow for Advanced AI at the Centre for Future Generations in Brussels, and a member of the OECD’s Expert Group on Artificial Intelligence (AI) Futures.
Viktoria ?sterdahl
Change Agent. Go-to Person. Viktoria ?sterdahl (maiden name: Ivarsson) leads Stakeholder Engagement & Special Projects in the Office of the President of ETH Zurich, to increase the visibility and renown of the university worldwide. She also manages the ETH Circle, an international network of alumni and friends of ETH Zurich who act as ambassadors. Formerly with EHL School of Hospitality, Hirslanden, and the World Economic Forum, Viktoria holds an MAS in Sports Administration and Technology from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL), and an MA in International Relations from the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies (HEI). A Swiss and Swedish national, she is fluent in 4 languages, and is currently learning German. A member of Nordiska, the Nordic Rowing Association, she can be found most mornings rowing on Lake Zurich.