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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.

Are you interested in doing an MSc thesis with my team? Here are some general points for you to consider. Note: some of these points are specific to TPM MSc theses, but most of them are equally valid for SET and external students.

Proposal. There are two purposes to the thesis proposal. First, it is the basis on which you and your supervisor(s) agree to work together, and agreement on the proposal is a requirement in our group before you can officially begin your thesis. It is not set in stone, but based on experience, having a clear basis to work from will make everybody’s life easier. Second, it is your work plan for the rest of your thesis. The thesis work has to be feasible within the length of time allotted by the MSc program you are in, and a clear proposal can be used to judge whether there will be sufficient time before you start - thereby avoiding issues later. If your first one or two sub-questions (see below) relate to literature review and/or establishing what methods to use, you need to have made a first stab at answering them in order to produce a credible proposal that you can use as a project plan.

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