I am an Assistant professor at the Department of Governance and Technology for Sustainable Development (CSTM) at the Faculty of Behavioural, Social and Management Science, University of Twente. I am also part of the vibrant group of 18 early career researchers across 4 Dutch technical universities supported by the 4TU.DeSIRE - the Strategic Research Program on Resilience, the Netherlands. I hold a PhD degree in Computational Social Science from Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, and has two years of postdoctoral research experience at the University of Amsterdam.
I have a strong passion for understanding how cities ‘emerge’ due to uncoordinated self-organization and how inequality is shaped in this era of rapid urbanization. My current research focuses on understanding the dynamics of poverty traps and on the development of novel computational methods for designing poverty alleviation pathways through regime-shifts. My previous research presented the first step towards a new generation of computational tools that uses complex systems theory and participatory demographic surveys in the management of informal settlements on the Global South. At the 4TU Resilient Engineering center, I apply resilience thinking to understand the nexus between climate change and poverty traps - whether climate change could widen or deepen poverty traps. I am also interested in quantifying resilience in the context of complex adaptive system.
I am a strong advocate of open exchange of data and models for the scientific community and dissemination of research results to the general public (Open Science).