Prof. Dr. Jan Börner
Project coordinator
Jan Börner is an agricultural and environmental economist with research and working experience in Latin America, Africa, and Europe. His research focuses on (1) land use and land use change, (2) economic evaluation of environmental and conservation policies, and (3) sustainability assessment in the bioeconomy.
Prof. Dr. Stephanie Bröring
Senior Researcher
Stefanie Bröring is a management scholar with a passion for novel technologies and innovation in the largers setting of the bioeconomy. Her research focuses on (1) strategic technology management, (2) innovation management in value chains and firms, and (3) public understanding of science and technology.
Prof. Dr. Thomas Dietz
Senior Researcher
Thomas Dietz is a scholar of International Relations and Law with a focus on global sustainable development. His research focuses on (1) transnational governance and law, (2) the effectiveness of non-state private governance in regulating global value chains especially in the coffee sector. Within the framework of STRIVE, (3) Thomas studies the governance frameworks that enable the rise of a sustainable bioeconomy.
PD Dr. Wolfgang Britz
Senior Researcher
Wolfgang Britz is a senior researcher and lecturer in a tenured position at the Institute for Food and Resource Economics, University Bonn, where his research focus is on the impacts of agricultural, environmental and trade policies on the agricultural sector, the environment and rural areas based on quantitative analysis with different types of economic simulation models. Since 2017, he leads the Economic Modeling of Agricultural Systems group after acting as temporary head of the "Production Economics" chair in 2016.
Dr. Jochen Dürr
Senior Researcher
Jochen Dürr is an agricultural economist with working experiences in Brazil and Guatemala. His research focus is on value chains and rural development. In STRIVE, he is investigating factors driving the bioeconomy in Argentina and its contribution to sustainable development.
Dr. Jan Janosch Förster
Senior Researcher
Janosch Förster is investigating the question of how to govern socio-economic processes related to the bioeconomy towards greater sustainability. He applies a multi-level governance perspective with a notion of social theory and life cycle thinking to case-based studies relating to bioplastics and biopharmaceuticals. His other research interests and academic expertise lie in the fields of natural resource governance, especially water governance in South Africa.
Dr. Nicolas Gerber
Senior Researcher
Nicolas Gerber is an environmental and resource economist with work experience in Africa and Asia. He has contributed to and led projects in the fields of food and nutrition security, sustainable agricultural intensification, or the water-sanitation-agriculture-health nexus. He is particularly interested in assessing and modeling household and individual behavior with respect to biomass use or the adoption of innovations and their impacts on production, nutrition and health.
Dr. Natalie Laibach
Senior Researcher
Natalie Laibach is interested in bioeconomy innovation and key enabling technologies. Her research focuses on identification and evaluation of those, also in terms of sustainability in cooperation with the other team members. She has a background in plant biology and experiences in yam and dandelion research.
Dr. Jingwen Li
Senior Researcher
Jingwen Li' research interest is to build an sustainability metrics system which is immediately applicable for CGE models and to examine the 1) the sustainable comparative advantage for each country, 2) impacts of global diversified bioeconomy policies and the trade-offs of conflicting sustainability goals (economic, environmental and social trade-offs). Combining machine learning techniques with sensitivity analysis based on CGE models, the main objective is to analyze the trajectory of bioeconomy growth and its implications on sustainability in a more holistic and comprehensive way.
Dr. Till Stellmacher
Senior Researcher
Till Stellmacher’s main field of expertise is governance, agrarian transformation, and environmental change in rural sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. He holds a PhD in agricultural sciences and has several years of work experience in development research in Ethiopia, Bangladesh, Tanzania and Burkina Faso. He is currently focusing on questions related to the local governance of socio-ecological systems towards a sustainable bioeconomy.
Ewere Evelyn Anyokwu
Junior Researcher
Ewere Evelyn Anyokwu is an agricultural economist. Her work focuses on economic gains and trade-offs of bio-economic investments in Nigeria. She studies implications of increased fossil fuel dependence on bio-based sector growth. She is further interested in studying the local and economy-wide assessment of impacts of a shift towards investment in bio-refineries as a bioeconomic transition from fossil dependence.
Yannic Rudá Damm
Junior Researcher
Yannic Damm an economist with interests in development economics and impact evaluation. He currently works on the effects of land use and land use change as well as on the evaluation and examination of environmental and conservations policies related to deforestation and soybean expansion in the Brazilian Amazon and Cerrado biomes.
James Henderson
Junior Researcher
James Henderson’s research is based on a better understanding of South American soybean production to consumption systems, and their role in the global bio-economy. His professional background spans several aspects of agricultural supply chains, having worked as a researcher for the United States Department of Agriculture, as an agricultural extensionist with the United States Peace Corps, with global trade issues at the International Center for Trade and Sustainable Development (ICTSD), as well as certification and sustainability issues for 4C/Global Coffee Platform (GCP).
Fernanda Martinelli
Junior Researcher
Fernanda Martinelli will investigate the trade-offs between bioeconomy indicators and the UN Sustainable Development Goals in Brazil. In her past experience she has led science-based projects for poverty alleviation, sustainable landscapes, and implementation of SDGs in Rio de Janeiro and the Brazilian Amazon region.
Gabriel Ponzoni Frey
Junior Researcher
Gabriel Ponzoni Frey is modeling the bioeconomy-driven soy expansion in the Brazilian Amazon looking at biophysical and economic drivers. He is interested in the bioeconomy commodity markets and their local and global implications for forest ecosystem services, especially biodiversity.
Former Project Staff
Dr. Lisa Biber-Freudenberger
Former Senior Researcher
Lisa Biber-Freudenberger is evaluating the benefits and risks of bio-economic strategies and innovations for the achievement of the UN Sustainability Goals (SDGs) based on different indicators. She is interested in cross-cutting issues between human development and biodiversity including topics such as conservation, climate change, infrastructure development and agriculture.
Dr. Neus Escobar
Former Senior Researcher
Neus Escobar has her expertise in Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), Life Cycle Costing and Social LCA for the sustainability evaluation of agriculture-based systems. She has hands on experience in economic modeling (i.e. GTAP) for Indirect Land Use Change (ILUC) quantification. She is currently focused on developing approaches for Consequential LCA, with the interest of studying emerging supply chains in the Bioeconomy, by considering innovation transfers, international biomass trade and sociopolitical contexts.
Dr. Angela Gubelt
Former Senior Researcher
Angela Gubelt was working on the identification and characterization of high potential future technologies for the bioeconomy based on the development of specific indicators for key enabling technologies (KETs), inspired by the European Commission’s initiative of defining KETs for the European economy. Her research mainly relied on a multistage survey of expert interviews and literature research.
Dr. Duy Nong
Former Senior Researcher
Duy Nong is an environmental and energy economist with work experience in Australia and the United States. He has extended a couple of computable general equilibrium (CGE) models to conduct research on climate change, environment and energy related issues with publications in Energy Economics, Energy Policy, and Journal of Cleaner Production among the others. His research interest was to employ the CGE modeling technique to assess the global dynamic impacts of the bio-based transformation pathways in the chemical sector, as well as to construct a theoretical model to examine the overall impacts of the bio-based transformation pathways.
Dr. Kirsten Selbmann-Lobbedey
Former Senior Researcher
Kirsten Selbmann-Lobbedey was comparing national of national bioeconomic policies (including regional and local levels) in the selected project countries Argentina and Uruguay also with regard to the active promotion of bioeconomic transformations. The focus was on governance in the agricultural sector, and in particular on the impact of pesticides in soya production as a result of the expansion of agricultural land in the countries.
Salwa Haddad
Former Junior Researcher
Salwa Haddad is interested in modelling the bioeconomy using a Computable General Equilibrium (CGE) economic model (i.e. GTAP model). She is currently focused on assessing the impact of a rapid expansion of bio-based materials (i.e. bioplastics) on land use, land use change and related GHG emissions at a global level.
Amit Kumar Basukala
Former Research Assistant
Amit was working as research assistant in the field of GIS and data management in this project. He was involved in development and maintenance of the project data base in collaboration with Center for Development Research (ZEF)’s data management team and partners at Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI). His other research interests and academic expertise lie in GIS and remote sensing based management of water resource, agriculture, food security, climate change, socioecological systems, ecosystem services, biodiversity, & sustainability.