Valérie Laforest is director of research at Mines Saint-Etienne/IMT and a member of the UMR CNRS 5600 “Environnement Ville Société”. Her research is positioned across two main axes with the aim of developing methodologies to support decision-making for sustainable industries and territories. For more than 25 years, Valérie Laforest has been interested in environmental technologies, having developed expertise on the performance assessment of best available techniques. As a second axis, she seeks to remove barriers to the operationalization of a circular economy by working on the assessment of the potential of a circular economy of territory. As part of her support for socio-economic actors in their transformations, these two lines of research are enriched by new approaches associated with the operationalization of strong sustainability in design processes or via the characterization of low-tech approaches. She is an active member of the Scientific Interest Group EEDEMS, the EcoSD network (for the ecodesign of sustainable systems) and the Quebec Circular Economy Research Network (RRECQ). A teacher for more than 25 years, she is involved in engineering, master's (M2) or specialized master's courses in areas associated with environmental regulations, best available techniques, ecotechnologies, strong sustainability and low-tech, as well as in industrial and territorial ecology.