Research Area

At the DSI, I (and a very small team) investigate how we can leverage digitalization to support actor networks in Zurich for urban sustainability (starting summer 2021). At the core of this is a persuasion that sustainability in the anthropocene is still «Handarbeit», as we call it in German. Sustainability is material work carried out on the ground through many small actions. I want a role for digitalization in supporting, not disrupting this work. In this vein, we are going to explore digital tools and data sources to map actor networks; gather actor knowledge through gamified participatory modeling; and use the resulting data to bring the right actors together in urban sustainability transformations.

Academic Career

I am a researcher studying sustainability governance and policy, networks and potential roles for digitalization in urban sustainability. I obtained my (summa cum laude) PhD degree from the University of Bern in 2019, for work mainly carried out at Eawag aquatic research. I had the privilege to visit the Stockholm Resilience Centre as a SNF-funded visiting researcher for four months in 2019. I was part of the 2019-2021 Robert Bosch postdoc academy for transformational leadership, which gathers outstanding researchers working on inter- and transdisciplinary sustainability topics. I taught and still supervise students at the University of Bern, besides teaching occasional network analysis and R workshops.