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There are fewer formal structures in academia than in many other careers and professional life is often interwoven with personal life. In addition, to follow a successful academic career, there is high external pressure to publish and acquire funding. In face of this reality, the following working policy sketches key points for a work environment to foster creative work while allowing for work-life balance.

1. The meaning of our work life

The overarching goal of all work in our group is to contribute to a better world by solving applied research questions around energy, the environment and society. It is easy to lose sight of this when battling with the daily demands of being an academic - writing papers, chasing grants, and dealing with the administrative minutae and politics of academic institutions. It helps to occasionally remind ourselves of the reason for it all, especially during difficult times.

Research

My group’s research is on the global transition to a 100% clean and renewable energy system. This includes designing future energy systems that are able to work with high shares of variable renewable electricity. A prerequisite for this is understanding the spatiotemporal variability of renewable generation and demand. But to develop a truly sustainable energy system it is also necessary to consider trade-offs between the energy transition and other concerns such as biodiversity protection. → More on my research areas.

This is a non-exhaustive and outdated overview of some of the externally funded research projects in my group.

ECEMF

ECEMF, the European Climate and Energy Modelling Forum, has dual aims. The long-term goal is to establish a permanent forum to connect policymakers with energy and climate researchers. In the short-term, a funded European research project is also developing a model-based evidence base to inform European climate and energy policy. One of the models used in the project is the Sector-Coupled Euro-Calliope model, which is developed in our group.

HA

Hariadi Aji
PhD candidate (since 2024)
Climate resilient planning for the Indonesian power system

Franziska Bock
PhD candidate (since 2021)
Trust, power, and information asymmetry in modelling

Meijun Chen
PhD candidate (since 2023)
Ethically aware modelling

Ema Gusheva
PhD candidate (since 2021)
Idea diffusion in the energy transition model-policy interface

Jann Launer
PhD candidate (since 2023)
Fine-graining and downscaling energy system models

Ivan Ruiz Manuel
PhD candidate (since 2023)
Energy system investment pathways and uncertainty

Stefan Strömer
PhD candidate (since 2023)
Applying decomposition methods to energy system optimisation

Alumni