Teaching staff

  • Dr. Ilse van Liempt

    Programme Coordinator of the research Master's
    Ilse van Liempt 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.

  • 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. 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. Kei Otsuki

    Associate Professor in International Development Studies
    Kei Otsuki’s 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. Michiel van Meeteren

    Assistant Professor in Human Geography
    Michiel van Meeteren'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.

  • 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

    Associate Professor in Urban Geography
    Bas Spierings' 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. 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. Yanliu Lin

    Associate Professor in Spatial Planning
    The research of Yanliu Lin crosses the boundary between digitalization, planning, governance and geography. She has been awarded an ERC Starting Grant on collaborative planning with the impact of social media and digital tools.