I am Assistant Professor ‘Governance of social-ecological-technical systems for improving resilience’ at the Public Administration and Policy Group of Wageningen University and Research (WUR). After gaining my BSc and MSc in Public Administration (cum laude) at Leiden University, I worked as a researcher at WUR and then decided to gain more practical experience outside of academia by working as a project manager and consultant at management consultancy firm Boer & Croon. I worked at diverse organizations in the public as well as private sector on different assignments that always entailed some form of change management, e.g. improving supply chain processes, improving education support processes, restructuring teams, and setting up new organizational departments. After some years in management positions, I returned to WUR to do my PhD research and to gain more in-depth knowledge. My PhD research was about how governments make and can make forward-looking decisions about end-of-lifetime water infrastructure. My main areas of expertise are decision making, governance, water policy, strategic management, and planning.
As member of the 4TU Centre for Resilience Engineering I contribute to developing knowledge about the governmental and institutional conditions, processes, mechanisms, and strategies that can contribute to establishing more resilient infrastructure. My research aims to increase our understanding of what enables governments, sometimes in collaboration with private sector actors, to make decisions about deeply uncertain long-term challenges in order to achieve sustainable and resilient societies. With my research I aim to contribute to (1) better equipped governance institutions and insightful decision support methods and agent-based models; (2) adaptive long-term infrastructure planning; and (3) intervention logics and heuristics for decision making about the long term. The 4TU Resilience Engineering centre helps to develop interdisciplinary research and combine state-of-the-art engineering knowledge with new decision support methods and models, and knowledge about governance. Knowledge about governance is needed to stimulate governments to implement new technologies and make better decisions for more resilient societies: societies that can recover from shocks, adapt to change, and transform to more desired futures when needed.