Navigating Energy Transition Complexities

Prof Dr Murat Arsel is a Professor of Political Economy of Sustainable Development at the International Institute of Social Studies (ISS) of Erasmus University Rotterdam. He received a PhD at the University of Cambridge, to which followed a position as post-doctoral lecturer at the University of Chicago. I held the Keyman Family Visiting Professorship at Northwestern University and is Adjunct Professor at Universidad San Francisco de Quito. I is also currenlty the Chair of the Editorial Board of Development and Change. Situated firmly within development studies and informed by political ecology, heterodox economics, social theory, and agrarian political economy, his work focuses on the tensions between nature, capitalism, and emancipatory socio-economic change.
 

Louise van Schaik is Head of Unit EU & Global Affairs. She also coordinates Clingendael research in the field of climate change and sustainable development. In her research she has extensively analysed the EU’s performance in multilateral bodies, including in the fields of climate change, health and food standards. She has also published on related research areas such as EU foreign policy, EU climate change and energy policy, EU research policy, scarcity of natural resources and green growth.

Steve Kennedy is Associate Professor of Business Sustainability at Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University. His research approaches how systems and resilience thinking can help organizations to tackle grand societal challenges such as climate change and biodiversity loss. Dr Kennedy has experience collaborating with partners on sustainability in a wide variety of sectors including finance, construction, agriculture, electronics, and chemicals. His research has featured in peer-reviewed scientific journals such as Journal of Management Studies, Strategic Organization, Long Range Planning, Business & Society, Journal of Cleaner Production and Business Strategy & the Environment. 

Dr Yashar Ghiassi-Farrokhfal is an Associate Professor at the Rotterdam School of Management. Additionally, he is the academic director of Smart Energy at the Erasmus Center for Data Analytics (ECDA) and the communication director of ACM SIGEnergy. He obtained his Ph.D. degree from the University of Toronto, Canada. He has several publications in top-notch journals and has organized multiple conferences/workshops in the field of the energy transition. He has also been involved in multiple European projects such as FlexSUS (heat transition of municipalities) and MAGPIE (Energy transition in Ports). He uses multi-disciplinary approaches and has studied several aspects of energy transitions such as sector coupling, microgrids, electric vehicles, hydrogen, energy storage, and market mechanisms at retail, wholesale, peer-to-peer, and bilateral levels.