Research Area

At the DSI, I lead thesustainability.discourses project. We (Myriam Pham-Truffert, Neitah Müller, Viviane Walker and I) investigate the governance, discourses and narratives of urban sustainability, with a focus on urban sustainable transport in Zürich. We develop automated models to track and understand urban sustainability discourses using large volumes of media data. We also investigate how citizens assess interactions between urban sustainable development goals and how they perceive possible future impacts of digital technology.

I also co-lead the DSI Community Sustainability, which gathers UZH researchers working on sustainable digitalization.

Academic Career

I am a researcher studying the governance, discourse and narratives of sustainability transformations and digitalization. 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 have taught and supervised students at the University of Bern and Zürich.

My expertise as a researcher lies in connecting my scientific knowledge of sustainability, digitalization, governance and policy to innovative computational social science skills. I love to use Natural Language Processing, Bayesian Regression Modeling and Network Analysis in applied research. In the best case, this happens in combination with qualitative perspectives in an interdisciplinary team.