Project Staff

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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 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’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 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 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.

Anja is responsible for the maintenance of the STRIVE website. She has been creating and maintaining various websites with different content mangement systems for years and is also responsible for technical support within the project.