Joan Ballantine

Joan is an accounting graduate and Fellow of the Association of Chartered Certified Accountants (FCCA). After working in industry and gaining her professional qualification, she moved into academia, holding positions at Warwick Business School (where she earned a PhD) and Queen’s University, Belfast. Since 2008, she has been Professor of Accounting at Ulster University, teaching a range of subjects including strategic management accounting at undergraduate and Masters levels.

An active researcher, Joan work focuses on accounting education (including sustainability), entrepreneurship and gender equality, including gender budgeting and women in senior management. She has secured around £600k in research funding as principal investigator and currently leads a work package for the £4.8m EPIC Futures NI Local Policy Innovation Partnership (UKRI-funded) supporting economically inactive individuals back into work.

Professor at the University of Dundee (Scotland), specialising in Accounting and Sustainability.

He has previously lectured at Birmingham Business School, the University of Strathclyde, and Heriot-Watt University, and served as Director of the Centre for Responsible Business and convenor of the Centre for Social and Environmental Accounting.

For over 30 years, he has conducted research into matters relating to responsibility, sustainability, and accountability.

Chair of the International Ethics Standards Board for Accountants (IESBA) since 2022.

Chair of the Portuguese Securities Market Commission (CMVM), from 2016 to 2022, where she was the first woman to lead the Portuguese markets regulator.

With a background in Law from the University of Coimbra, she has extensive international experience in auditing standards, ESG, and regulatory policy.

Sofia Manso is a recognized leader in Organizational Happiness, People Development, and Leadership Culture. With a career that combines purpose with strategic management, human-centered leadership, psychological safety, and innovation, she has dedicated herself to transforming organizations through a people-first approach that sees well-being and happiness as key drivers of productivity and sustainable success.

She is currently the CEO of Academia da Felicidade and Head of People at Grupo Bernardo da Costa, where she designs and implements strategies that unlock human potential and foster resilient, collaborative, and high-performing organizational cultures.

Her specialization in Leadership & Management from Harvard Business School reinforces her commitment to excellence and continuous evolution in people management. With a disruptive vision for the future of work, Sofia has trained and inspired hundreds of professionals through mentoring, management consulting, and international keynote speaking, addressing topics such as humanized leadership, psychological safety, employee engagement, and organizational transformation.

Sofia believes that happy companies are not only more productive — they are the future.

Her mission is to challenge leaders to rethink how they manage, inspire, and grow their teams, building organizations where people are truly the most valuable strategic asset.

Juliana Carreira holds a degree in Journalism and Communication from the Faculty of Arts of the University of Coimbra and a Master’s in Communication Sciences with a specialisation in Strategic Communication from the Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities of the Nova University of Lisbon. She also completed a Post-graduate degree in Sustainability Management at ISEG - Lisbon School of Economics & Management.

She has been part of the PwC team for about four years, during which time she has collaborated on various sustainability consulting projects in the areas of strategic definition and sustainability reporting. Her work has particularly focused on reporting in alignment with emerging legal requirements, frameworks, and ESG indices, for clients such as Altice, REN, Grupo José de Mello, SCML, Millennium bcp, Fidelidade, The Fladgate Partnership, and Grupo Lusiaves.

Degree in Environmental Engineering from the Escola Superior de Biotecnologia (College of Biotechnology) at the Universidade Católica Portuguesa (Portuguese Catholic University), having interned at the Technical University of Munich. Degree in Consultancy and Translation from the Instituto Superior de Contabilidade e Administração do Porto (Porto Accounting and Business School).

Certified Project Management Associate by IPMA (International Project Management Association) and Certified Green Project Manager by GPM (Green Project Management).

In 2002, she joined LIPOR. She served in strategic planning and project management roles in the area of prevention and selective collection of urban waste.