After studying engineering, Judith Pigneur worked on the social and environmental impacts of mining, in NGOs (ISF France, SystExt, and Friends of the Earth), with companies (Basic, Fairphone) and in academia (CentraleSupélec). Her PhD work focused on the depletion of metallic resources, and in particular on the multiplication of social and environmental costs caused by the decrease in the quality and quantity of available resources. She studied in particular the neodymium sector, a rare earth used in permanent magnets, including for the manufacture of wind turbines and electric vehicle motors, and highlighted the need to consider the issue of the material footprint in the ecological transition.
Today, she is launching a project to contribute to the emergence of transition models to reduce the mineral footprint of our societies.