Amsterdam, North Holland, Netherlands
With a background in social psychology and sustainability sciences, I'm currently applying computational methods to study the role of human behavior in the energy transition. More specifically, my research explores how we can integrate socio-psychological insights into agent-based models to improve policy advice for sustainable transitions. Agent-based modeling is a simulation method that models the actions and interactions of individual agents, in my case energy decisions by households, to explore how system behavior emerges.
In my PhD research, I study how to bring insights about human behavior into energy system models. I do this using agent-based models, which simulate households as individual decision-makers who interact with each other and their surroundings. We focus on how households decide whether to install a heat pump, and how they use it after adoption. We then test how different policy strategies might influence that behavior. My research is part of the SPR-CHANGE project at the Dutch National Institute for Public Health and the Environment, where we aim to assess sustainable energy technologies not just in terms of their carbon impact, but also their effects on health, safety, and the environment—and how all of these impacts are influenced by human behavior. By linking behaviorally rich models of household energy decisions with impact assessments, we hope to provide more realistic advice to support a sustainable energy transition.
Carried out a systematic literature review on combining transdisciplinary and complexity sciences for sustainable transitions with a large team of complexity and transdisciplinary scientists, resulting in a paper (currently in review).
Assisted an international research project on public perceptions of the energy transition, resulting in a paper.