Academic staff

Dr. Kei Otsuki
Dr. Kei Otsuki is the Coordinator of the Research Master
Kei is Associate Professor in International Development Studies. Her research interests center on social equity and justice for sustainable development. She critically explores contested relationships between the global quest for sustainability transitions and local development. Currently, she and her team investigate impacts of 'green' extractivism, infrastructure and nature conservation in Mozambique and new forest city development in Indonesia.
Dr. Ilse van Liempt
Associate Professor and Research Leader
Ilse is Associate Professor in Urban Geography and one of the four research leader of the Focus Area Migration and Societal Change at Utrecht University. She completed her PhD at the Institute for Ethnic and Migration Studies and has published widely on migration, refugees, gender, public space, and processes of inclusion and exclusion.
Prof. dr. Ron Boschma
Chair Professor of Regional Economics
Ron Boschma has laid the foundations for Evolutionary Economic Geography together with other scholars. Among the topics he has published in international journals are regional diversification, Smart Specialization policy, geography of innovation, regional resilience, spatial evolution of industries, structure and evolution of spatial networks, and agglomeration externalities and regional growth.
Prof. dr. Carolina Castaldi
Chair Professor of Geography of Innovation
Carolina Castaldi's research focuses on innovation processes and how they develop over time and across space. She has contributed to economic geography by focusing attention on diversity in knowledge as a source of regional innovation, and she continues to investigate how innovation drives regional development and place resilience.
Dr. Pierre-Alexandre Balland
Associate Professor in Economic Geography
Pierre-Alexandre Balland analyzes economic development from the perspective of complex systems. Some of his areas of expertise include complex systems, cities, and artificial intelligence. He had and has connections with institutions such as the Toulouse Institute for Artificial and Natural Intelligence, Media Lab at MIT, and the UCLA Department of Geography.
Dr. Sergio Petralia
Dr. Sergio Petralia is Assistant Professor in Economic Geography
Sergio Petralia joined the Center for International Development's Growth Lab as a visiting Fellow in 2018. Sergio is currently working on issues related to technological change and innovation. Most of his research projects study the emergence and spatial concentration of new technologies using historical data on patent activity, the identification of the challenges and opportunities for technological development in developing economies, and the impact of disruptive technological change on income and wages. Sergio holds a Bachelors in Economics from the University of Buenos Aires, a Masters in Economics from the University of San Andres in Buenos Aires, and Msc in Economics from Pennsylvania State University in the U.S. He finished his Ph.D. at Utrecht University in 2017.
Dr. Romain Dittgen
Dr. Romain Dittgen is Assistant Professor in International Development Studies
Romain Dittgen is interested in questions of urban change, both through the lens of materiality and forms of living together, as well as in the interplay between city-making and migration. Empirically, his work focuses on South Africa and Zambia with more recent explorations into dense and highly diverse urban contexts in Western Europe. Romain is also affiliated with the Center for Asian Studies in Africa (University of Pretoria) and the International Institute for Asian Studies (Leiden University).
Dr. Bishawjit Mallick
Associate Professor in International Development Studies
Bishawjit Mallick is an Associate Professor at Utrecht University. Before joining here, he worked as a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Global Fellow at the IBS at University of Colorado Boulder, USA and holds a researcher position at TU Dresden, Germany. His current research focuses on the historical grounding of non-migration (the reasons why people voluntarily remain in place, how the social, environmental and political regime contributes to staying put).
Dr. Femke van Noorloos
Dr. Femke van Noorloos is Assistant professor in International Development Studies
Femke’s research focuses on urban development in Africa and Latin America, particularly on land and housing issues in (sub)urban settings, new cities and private sector investment in urban development, citizen initiatives and urban governance.
Prof. dr. Niki Frantzeskaki
Chair Professor of Regional and Metropolitan Governance and Planning
Niki Frantzeskaki specializes in urban transitions and their governance and planning, with a focus on sustainability, resilience, liveability, as well as on the governance of just urban transitions with nature-based solutions in cities. With a portfolio of on-going projects in Europe, Australia, Canada and the United States of America, she has extensive international research experience.
Prof. dr. Jochen Monstadt
Chair Professor of Governance of Urban Transitions
Jochen Monstadt is Professor of Governance of Urban Transitions and co-chairs the Spatial Planning section. At the same time, he is visiting professor at the Laboratoire Techniques, Territoires et Sociétés (LATTS), Université Gustave Eiffel, Paris. His research and teaching interests have revolved around the contingent and place-based transformation patterns of cities and how these are mediated by technical infrastructures (energy, water, wastewater, solid waste, transportation, and ICTs). His specific interest is how the socio-technical design and governance of those critical systems shape the sustainability of cities in the global North and South.
Dr. Gideon Bolt
Associate Professor in Urban Geography
Gideon Bolt research interests include residential segregation, migrant housing, neighbourhood change, neighbourhood effects, social cohesion and urban renewal policies.
Dr. Marco Helbich
Dr. Marco Helbich is Associate Professor in Urban Geography
Marco Helbich’s research interest lie in understanding how urban areas influence humans’ health and how cities function. His research bridges the gap between technology and data-driven geographic information science and urban geography. A wide spectrum of pressing urban challenges such as health, transportation, housing, urban growth, and crime are addressed through Marco’s research.
Dr. Gerald Mollenhorst
Assistant Professor in Urban Geography
Gerald Mollenhorst has extensive experience in social network research. His work focuses on how contextual opportunities and constraints affect the composition, structure and dynamics of personal networks, as well as the interrelationship between network and contextual characteristics and life chances and behavior of individual actors.
Dr. Bas Spierings
Dr. Bas Spierings is Associate Professor in Urban Geography
Bas' research focuses on the nexus between urban consumption, retailing, and public space. He is particularly interested in city center competition, commercial gentrification, urban tourism, leisure shopping and encounters with difference. As director of the Netherlands Graduate School of Urban and Regional Research (NETHUR), he oversees the PhD training programme.
Dr. S.M Labib
Dr. S.M Labib is Assistant Professor in Spatial Data Science and Health
Labib’s research focuses on developing and applying spatial data-driven methods (e.g., GIS, Remote sensing) and models (e.g., machine learning) in studying urban built and natural environments (e.g., greenspace) and their relations with public health, transportation, and sustainable development in cities in diverse locations. He also works as visiting researcher at the University of Cambridge and maintains extensive international research collaborations in the United States of America, the UK, and Australia. Some of Labib’s ongoing lab research examples can be found here: https://github.com/Spatial-Data-Science-and-GEO-AI-Lab
Dr. Ing. Jaime Soza Parra
Dr. Jaime Soza Parra is Assistant Professor in Urban Geography
Jaime’s research interests encompass the relationship between car dependency, sustainable transportation, and the impact of uncertainty in travel decisions through the analysis of multiple data sources, from passively collected (e.g. smartcard information) to surveys (e.g. discrete choice stated preference surveys). Jaime is also concerned about cities increasing growth rate and its sustainability implications and he sees public transportation and active transport as the alternatives to promote.
Dr. Michiel van Meeteren
Dr. Michiel van Meeteren is Assistant Professor in Human Geography
Michiel's primary occupation is to help forge a geographical discipline that is ready to contribute to alleviating the global challenges confronting humanity in the 21st century. Building on a rich experience in urban, economic and financial geography, he strives for new geographical syntheses by illuminating the rich history of geographical thought through pluralist, reflexive and open epistemologies and pedagogies.