Academic Staff
The Sustainable Development Master's Programme is proud to have a diverse and dedicated team of experts who bring a wealth of knowledge and experience in the field of sustainable development. Our academic staff members are leading thinkers and researchers in their fields through their activities at the Copernicus Institute for Sustainable Development, and are committed to fostering an engaging and supportive learning environment for our students. Let us introduce you to the faculty members who make this program exceptional.
Dr. Tatiana Acevedo Guerrero
Dr. Tatiana Acevedo Guerrero is an engaged researcher and teacher from Santander, Colombia currently working as Assistant Professor at the Copernicus Institute for Sustainable Development, Utrecht University, forming part of the Environmental Governance Group. Dr. Acevedo Guerrero has experience in interdisciplinary social-environmental studies, learned from -mostly Colombian- schools and universities, but also through the environmental and political struggles. Her work is situated broadly at the intersection of urban studies and political ecology, but she also cultivates interests in postcolonial/decoloniality, Caribbean, Colombian and Latin American studies.
Courses:
Introduction to Political Ecology
Research Design
Research Methods for Politics, Ecology and Society
Prof. Dr. Frank Biermann
Dr. Frank Biermann is a research professor of Global Sustainability Governance with the Copernicus Institute of Sustainable Development at Utrecht University, The Netherlands. He is an internationally leading scholar of global institutions and organizations in the sustainability domain. Biermann pioneered the ‘earth system’ governance paradigm in global change research in 2005 and was the founder and first chair (2008-2018) of the Earth System Governance Project, a leading global transdisciplinary research network of sustainability scholars. Biermann has authored or edited 19 books and published about 200 articles in peer-reviewed journals and chapters in academic books.
Dr. Wina Crijns-Graus
Wina Graus is Assistant Professor at the Copernicus Institute of Sustainable Development of Utrecht University since 2010. Her research focusses on energy efficiency and renewable energy, with a main focus on industries and the power sector. Within the Sustainable Development Master's program, she (co)coordinates the courses Energy Supply Technologies, Tools for Energy & Material Analysis, and the Consultancy Project. Wina holds an MSc in Energy Technology & Policy from TU Eindhoven (2001) and a PhD degree from Utrecht University (2010) in international comparisons of energy efficiency and GHG emissions of power generation.
Prof. Dr. Peter Driessen
Peter Driessen has been professor of Environmental Governance at the Copernicus Institute of Sustainable Development since 2004. He is head of the research group Environmental Governance. Driessen is currently working on finding new governance strategies for climate adaptation and for countering soil subsidence in the Dutch lowlands. Driessen's research contributes to the scholarly and political debate on sustainability governance, by analyzing interventions that have the potential to make governance outcomes more congruent with sustainability goals. His research addresses a long-standing theoretical and empirical concern of ‘what works where, when and why’.
Courses:
Research Design
Dr. Anna Duden
Dr. Anne Duden holds a PhD from Utrecht University and works at the Copernicus Institute of Sustainable Development as an Assistant Professor. She teaches in the courses Natural Resource Management and Society and Scientist in Policy. Her areas of interest include biodiversity and climate change and has been a speaker at a number of international conferences along those themes.
Courses:
Natural Resource Management and Society
Dr. Oreane Edelenbosch
Dr. Oreane Edelenbosch works at the Environmental Science Department of the Copernicus Institute for Sustainable Development, focusing in particular on the contribution of energy efficiency and demand changes in buildings, industry and transport to global climate scenarios. She has held positions at PBL Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency, during which she obtained her PhD, and as a post-doc researcher at Polytechnic University of Milan, where her work focused on modelling the impacts of behavior and heterogeneity on energy consumption.
Dr. Giuseppe Feola
Coordinator of the Politics, Ecology and Society track
Dr. Giuseppe Feola works as an Associate Professor of Social Change for Sustainability in the Copernicus Institute of Sustainable Development. He conducts research on socioecological change in modern societies and is currently examining ongoing processes of societal transformation towards forms of society and economy which aim at the wellbeing of all and sustain the ecological basis of life. He aims to develop an empirically based theory of societal transformation to sustainability, to contribute to the societal debate and build a bridge between theory and political action. Dr. Feola's main empirical foci are those of agri-food systems, and grassroots actors and social movements.
Courses:
Research Design
Social Innovation and Alternatives to Development
Dr Kees Klein Goldewijk
Kees has 30 years of experience in environmental research, with particular emphasis on integrated global environment assessments. He is interested in (historical) land-use modeling/reconstructions, and working across disciplines such as History, Archaeology, Paleoecology, and also in the feedback mechanisms of these historical land-use changes to the global carbon cycle and climate. He is the founder and developer of the History Database of the Global Environment (HYDE) and has many publications in the field of global environmental problems.
Dr. Robert Harmsen
Coordinator of the Energy & Materials track
Robert Harmsen is assistant professor Energy & Resources at the Copernicus Institute of Sustainable Development. He studies the dynamics of the factors driving the energy transition, and aims to contribute to improving knowledge on how policy interaction can be accounted for in policy design. Robert is coordinating two courses in the master Sustainable Development, track Energy & Materials: Tools for Energy & Material Analysis and Policies for Energy & Material Transitions. His research focuses on heat transition, the residential sector, driving factors in energy transition and policy interaction.
Courses:
Advanced Energy Analysis
Consultancy Project
Policies for Energy & Materials Transitions
Research Design
Tools for Energy and Materials Analysis
Dr. Dries Hegger
Dr. Dries Hegger is an Associate Professor of regional water and climate governance at Utrecht University. Dries Hegger has published about both key topics of citizen engagement and science-policy interactions in peer-reviewed journals. He has collaborated with various societal actors on these issues, both Dutch stakeholders operating at the regional and national level, nationally and internationally operating consultancy firms and international organizations. Dr. Hegger's research focuses on citizen engagement in regional water- and climate governance, and improved science-policy interactions through knowledge co-creation.
Courses:
Research Design
Dr. Frank van Laerhoven
Coordinator of the Sustainable Development Master.
Dr. Frank van Laerhoven holds a PhD in Public Policy from Indiana University. Between 1996 and 2002, he has worked on environmental policy issues as an international civil servant and consultant for the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) in Senegal and Chile, respectively. Dr. van Laerhoven studies environmental governance, particularly the governance of ecosystems. His research agenda includes an interest in common pool resources (CPRs), socio-ecological systems, decentralization reforms, local democracy and participation, and the solving of collective action dilemmas.
Courses:
Analysing Governance Practices
Governance Theories
Research Strategies ESG
Dr. Heleen Mees
Heleen Mees is an Associate Professor of local sustainability governance. She is the research coordinator and member of the Management Team of the Environmental Governance group. Heleen is Board member and coordinator of the Geosciences Honours College. Her research interests concern (supra-)local governance issues related to urban sustainable development, including topics such as: governance modes, responsibility allocations, climate justice, democratic governance (legitimacy & accountability), forms of citizen engagement and the roles of citizen initiatives. Her main empirical field of interest is climate change adaptation governance.
Anushri Narayan Visweswaran MSc
Anushri Narayan Visweswaran has been teaching within the Global Sustainability Science Bachelor and the Sustainable Development Master programmes since November 2021. Her teaching tasks include giving lectures and tutorials, supervising Bachelor theses, tutoring first year Bachelor students and co-coordinating courses. In her research, she focuses on NGOs’ activities in forest common pool resources of the Western Ghats region in India. She studies how NGOs intervene to promote collective community forest management and how these interventions can be connected to commons literature.
Dr. James Patterson
Coordinator of the Earth System Governance Track
Dr. James Patterson is an interdisciplinary social scientist working at the intersection of political science and environmental studies. His research focuses on the politics and governance of complex public good problems, especially climate change. He is also the Principal Investigator of a 5-year research project funded by the European Research Council (2021-2026) investigating backlash to climate policy in advanced industrial democracies. Dr. Patterson has an interest in the politics and governance of sustainability transformations working on topics such as climate change adaptation, urban and environmental governance, and collective action in The Netherlands, Canada, and Australia.
Courses:
Research Design
Dr. Luis Eduardo Ramirez Camargo
Luis is Assistant Professor in the Energy & Resources group of the Copernicus Institute of Sustainable development of Utrecht University. His research areas include integrated spatial and energy planning, energy meteorology, renewable energies, spatiotemporal modelling, and geographic information systems. He is interested in Wind Power integration, energy communities and the global scalability of high-resolution spatiotemporal models for renewable energies and renewable fuels development. Before joining the Copernicus institute, he was conducting transdisciplinary work and leading international research projects in the energy field at research institutions in Austria, Belgium, and Germany.
Courses:
Data Analytics for Sustainability
Systems thinking, Scenarios & Indicators for SD
Dr. Britta Ricker
Dr. Britta Ricker works as Assistant Professor at the Copernicus Institute of Sustainable Development. Through her research, she aims to illuminate techniques to make tools associated with Geographic Information Science (GIScience) more accessible to diverse audiences. As a GIScience researcher, she seeks to identify new ways in which to visualize and understand these big data in an interactive fashion. She strives to investigate accessible methods of visualizing spatial data interactively and experiments with new, low-cost, accessible technologies. Currently, her research focuses on monitoring and communicating the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDG).
Prof. Dr. Max Rietkerk
Dr. Max Rietkerk is a full professor of Spatial Ecology and Global Change and the Head of Environmental Sciences at Copernicus Institute of Sustainable Development. His research focuses on Spatial Ecology and Global Change and has been published in more than 100 articles in international refereed scientific journals, including top journals such as Nature and Science. Dr. Rietkerk teaches two courses, Ecosystem Change in the Antropocene and Global Environmental Change. He is also invited to speak and present his research in international conferences in various countries.
Courses:
Global Environmental Change
Dr. Arie Staal
Dr. Arie Staal is Assistant Professor of Ecosystem Resilience at the Copernicus Institute of Sustainable Development. He studies how feedbacks within ecosystems, and between ecosystems and the climate, amplify or dampen the effects of global changes. Much of his research has focused on the Amazon rainforest, addressing the question whether global climate change and deforestation may trigger tipping points of self-propagating forest loss. In 2020, he received a NWO VENI grant for the proposal “Recovering tropical forest resilience in the Anthropocene”. He has published over 40 peer-reviewed articles, some of which have generated large scientific impact and gained much popular attention.
Courses:
Environmental Systems Analysis
Quantifying Ecosystem Resilience to Global Environmental Change
Dr. Diana Vela Almeida
Diana Vela Almeida is an Assistant Professor on Political Ecology of Sustainability. She works at the interface between the fields of political ecology, ecological economics and feminist critical geography and her research focuses on resource extraction and political participation, green neoliberal schemes, the energy transition, social movements and socio-environmental transformation. She has conducted extensive field research in Ecuador, Peru and Indonesia and has written about resource geography, austerity, political ecology in Latin America, eco-territorial struggles and social movements, and a critique of the green capitalism of the new green transition proposals.
Courses:
Perspectives on Sustainable Development
Research Design
Research Methods for Politics, Ecology and Society
Dr. Joost Vervoort
An ecologist by training, Dr Joost Vervoort holds a PhD from Wageningen University which focused on supporting different societal perspectives in navigating complex societal challenges related to sustainability. Joost's research focuses on how different imaginations of the future connect to action in the present and he has published widely on foresight, anticipatory governance, transformations, and simulation gaming. Joost leads the courses Global Transformation Project and the Sustainability Game, and is currently in the process of developing a new course titled Theories of Change in Action focusing on assumptions and processes of change in societies and organizations.
Courses:
Theories of Change in Action
Dr. Kaj-Ivar van der Wijst
Kaj-Ivar van der Wijst is an assistant professor in Global Modelling at the Copernicus Institute of Sustainable Development. He has contributed to the IPCC Working Group III (Mitigation of Climate Change) and the Synthesis Report of the 6th Assessment Report. His research focuses on the economic damages of climate change, comparing costs and benefits of global climate policy and data analysis and data visualisation of the IPCC scenario database. His teaching focuses on mathematics for sustainable development, systhem thinking and quantitative approaches, and the IPCC and integrated modelling.
Courses:
Integrated Assessment of Climate Change
Systems thinking, Scenarios & Indicators for SD
Prof. Dr. Ernst Worrell
Dr. Ernst Worrell is a full professor and chair of Energy, Materials and Environment at the Copernicus Institute of Sustainable Development. His research focuses on the relations between energy and material use and the environment, and possibilities to limit these by means of efficiency improvement. He currently teaches two course, Energy Analysis (at the Bachelor's level) and Squaring the Circular Economy (for Master's students).
Courses:
Squaring the Circular Economy