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I am a sustainability transition scholar with over 25 years international experience. I contribute to theory development on: socio-technical system innovation, governance, sustainable development and innovation. I study novel ways of organising systems through new  institutional arrangements. In that work I unpack upscaling, experimentation by communities, co-creation and new business models. My empirical domains are (smart) energy and mobility, and I sympathise with cities’ agendas. I study renewables and new, multi-system technologies such as AI. The geo scope of my work covers Europe and Global South (Asia, India, Thailand). I use transitions as my home discipline from where I take trans-disciplinary ‘detours’ to other fields.

My research is funded by NWO, EU, APN, NRC, DFG and Dutch Ministries. Currently I am a project leader of a € 10,4M Interreg NWE project on Smart Community-Owned Renewable Energy (SmartCORE), a follow up of the €7,1M community-based Virtual Power Plant (cVPP). Both projects consider most effective ways to scale-up community energy initiatives. cVPP has won two prizes: the EU Citizens Award for Sustainable Energy Innovation and IE&IS Valorization Award. Recently I shifted my focus to regional Energy Transition and Transformative Universities. Being driven by the urgent need to ack on sustainability, I regularity engage with practical contexts.

From 2021 I serve as the ºÚÁϸ£ÀûÍø Sustainability Ambassador. In that capacity, I advise the University Exectuive Board on best ways to integrate sustainability across university's research, education, valorisation and operations, and provide science-based leadership to the Sustainability Office.

I am a regular guest speaker, guest editor, reviewer and I publish in leading journals. Between 2017-2022 I served as an Associate Editor of the Urban Transformations journal.


PhD SUPERVISION

Tanja Manders
Brett Petzer
Luc van Summeren
Shelly Tsui
Jasper van Dijk
Amira El Faiz
Laura van den Berghe
Anna Shindler
Aakash Abraham
Felix Landsman
Kamila Konik
Gijs ten Berge
Arundatthi Patil
Stijn Bruls (With UT and UU)
Sjoerd de Jager

My background is in innovation sciences. As part of my PhD, I studied European renewable energy from the Technological Innovation System (TIS) perspective at Innovation Studies Group of Utrecht University. This work contributed to the conceptualisation of systemic innovation problems and instruments, and to the spatial expansion of the TIS framework.

In paralel I conducted research on sustainability transitions at the Institute for Environmental Studies at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (IVM-VU). My involvement with this field started in 1999 when I became an executive officer of the Industrial Transformation Science Project of the International Human Dimension Program (IHDP). Within that task, until 2011, I facilitated research on applying insights from the emerging stream of system innovation in the context of analyzing economic and environmental transitions occurring in developing Asia. This work facilitated translation of the novel, though very western, insights about systemic change to other socio-economic and geographical conditions. 

Through this research I became a founding and Steering Group member of the Sustainability Transitions Research Network (STRN). In 2015 I established a Global South, and in 2018, a Brazilian chapter of the STRN. In 2010-2017, on behalf of STRN, I have co-developed and implemented a series of challende-based professional trainings for entrepreneurs in sustainability transitions for Climate KIC and InnoEnergy KIC.