New employees at PLUS
The PLUS-research group welcomes six new employees from six different countries
Amin Khiali-Miab
Amin Khiali-Miab joined PLUS in January 2016 and started working towards his PhD in the CHECNET project. He will work on the coupling of the human network and the ecological network in a way that a developing human network can adapt to prevent thresholds in the ecological network from being reached. Amin studied Industrial and Systems Engineering and received his MSc. from Iran University of Science and Technology. He is interested in Complexity Science and has research experience at the Institute for Research in Fundamental Sciences (IPM), "Institute for Brain and Cognitive Science" and "Complex Systems Group" both at the Shahid Behesti University, and Iran University of Science and Technology.
Damian Ortiz Rodriguez
Damian Ortiz Rodriguez comes from Mexico. He obtained his MSc. degrees from LMU München and the University of Groningen, as part of the Erasmus Mundus Master Programme in Evolutionary Biology. He started his PhD in January 2016 within the framework of the CHECNET-project, which explores the relationship between ecological habitat networks and human transport networks. He focuses on the ecological part. His main research interests are networks, topological and spatial patterns, and dynamical complex systems in general.
Ana Stritih
Ana Stritih is from Slovenia and recently finished her master studies in Environmental Science at ETH. Her main research interests include forest ecology and ecosystem management. In December 2015, she started a PhD as part of ECOPOTENTIAL, a Horizon 2020 project aimed at using Earth Observation data to map ecosystem services.
Manuel Sudau
Manuel Sudau is from Germany and finished his diploma in Geography at the Philipp University of Marburg. Over more than two years he worked for a private research institute in the field of sustainable urban development and real estate. His research interests involve decision making and cultural-cognitive legitimation. Starting November 2015, Manuel is coordinating the teaching at PLUS and doing research on acceptance of policy instruments within the NFP68-project POLISOL.
Victoria Junquera
Victoria Junquera joined PLUS in October 2015 to work on the “Managing Telecoupled Landscapes”-project, where she will use Bayesian network modeling and participatory techniques to explain and forecast land use change and its socioeconomic impacts in northern Laos. Victoria became interested in food systems and their impact on people and the environment through her previous work on biofuel production and policy. She has a background in Chemical Engineering and an MS from the Energy and Resources Group (ERG) of the University of California, Berkeley, where her thesis work was on diversified food systems.
Elina Sirén
Elina Sirén started as a research assistant at PLUS in October 2015. She obtained her Master’s degree in Landscape Architecture and Planning (specialisation Spatial Planning) from Wageningen University in 2014 and has previously done her internship at PLUS. Her current research focuses on ecosystem service tools. Elina comes from Finland.