Team

Holder of a PhD in environmental science, Aurore conducts future-oriented research on the governance of social-ecological transitions from a social ecological economics perspective. She currently coordinates a prospective research project on the just transition to carbon neutrality and climate resilience in Brussels at horizon 2050.

Claire is a bioengineer, with a master degree in food science, technology and quality (UCLouvain). She is now working for the SUSFOODBEL project coordinated by Sciensano, in the context of her PhD. The project aims at identifying priority policies and their multiple impacts on sustainability, in the context of the transition towards healthy diets from sustainable food systems in Belgium. Her work focuses on the assessment of the environmental and health impacts of diets.

Edgar is an engineer by formation in construction and urban planning. After a year of professional practice, he entered the master’s in environmental sciences and Management from ULB, during which he completed an exchange at the University of Technology of Troyes, France. During this master's degree, he developed an appetite for research which led him to the completion of a doctoral thesis in Environmental Sciences and Management at IGEAT. Postdoc researcher on several research projects, Edgar also carries out expertise and consultancy assignments for various organizations.

Edwin Zaccai holds a doctorate in environmental science, he is a civil engineer-physicist and a graduate in philosophy. Full professor at the Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB) (emeritus since 2020). He founded the Center for Sustainable Development Studies (CEDD) in 1997 within the Institute for Environmental Management and Regional Planning (IGEAT), of which he was president. E. Zaccai was also a lecturer at Sciences Po Paris.

After a master's degree in sociology and a dissertation on sustainable food, I worked for an ASBL for almost two years before joining SONYA. Since October 2022, I've been working on my thesis project on sustainable practices in households with children, as well as assisting with the Master's degree in Environmental Science and Management.

Eugénie Stoclet holds a Master's degree in Geopolitics from the University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne in partnership with the Ecole Normale Supérieure (ENS Ulm). Since the end of 2020 she has been doing her PhD at the SONYA research center. Eugénie works on climate change impacts on water and on the perception of actors.

Fanny holds degrees in European Politics (2009, Paris 8; 2011, ULB) and Environmental Science and Management (2016, ULB) and is a PhD student at Sonya. After a dissertation on the fossil fuel divestment movement, she is pursuing her research on climate activism in a thesis supervised by Edwin Zaccai and Tom Bauler.

Julien is a research associate to SONYA studying power dynamics in socio-ecological transitions from ecological economics and political economy perspectives.

Kimberley has a master’s degree in political sciences (Ghent University) and in environmental sciences (Université Libre de Bruxelles). She is currently working on eco-shaming in the context of her PhD.

Professor. Louise holds the ULB Chair of Environmental Humanities. She conducted her doctoral and post-doctoral research at the VUB, UCLouvain and ULB studying various aspects of the nexus between democracy and the environment; focusing on environmental social movements, the crisis of representative democracy, and ecological emotions.

Maria holds the « Environmental Humanities » Chair at ULB. She works on power dynamics in environmental governance and is particulalry interested in the diversity of socio-environmental relations, including how these are conceptualized.

As a doctoral student and assistant to the Master in Environmental Sciences, my research focuses on the human perception of nature and the relationship with animals, especially birds, in contemporary times.

Associate researcher. She specializes in climate change policies, climate change adaptation issues and North-South dimensions.

Lecturer, specialist in energy and sustainability, and energy advisor at the ULB Vice-Rectorate for Sustainable Development.

I am an FNRS post-doctoral researcher at the Université libre de Bruxelles (ULB), attached to the REPI (Research and studies in international politics), to SONYA (Socio-Environmental Dynamics Research Group), and to the IEE (Institute of European Studies). Since 2022, I have been conducting a research project on the role of critical raw materials in the energy transition, specifically looking at the lithium sector.

Samuel Lietaer is an environmental social scientist working on the subjective dimensions of human interactions with environmental change, with a focus on marginal regions of low-income countries. He is currently working for the MIGRADAPT research project in Senegal to which he couples a PhD-thesis at SONYA (Research Center on Socio-Enviromental Dynamics, previously Centre d’Etudes du Développement Durable) of the Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB).

Solène is associate researcher at SONYA, and has a mandate to supervise thesis for the Master in Environmental Management. Her research focuses on sustainable production and consumption modes, relating sustainability assessment and transition governance (including exnovation/deliberate decline). She has a double background in Economics (2007) and Environmental Management (2014). After a PhD on the methodological development of Social Life Cycle Analysis (with an application in the food sector and in collaboration with the COSY-Food project), she worked as a postdoc researcher for the GOSETE project, investigating exnovation processes in the Brussels Capital Region (2020-2023).

Sonia Vanderhoeven is a lecturer at ULB. As part of the Master's degree in Environmental Science and Management, she is in charge of the ‘Biological Systems’ course and supervises dissertations.

My current research focuses on understanding how collaborative processes can contribute to the transformation towards regenerative sustainability in the São Francisco River Basin, Brazil. In addition, I explore how the infusion of relational and decolonial methodologies/ontologies can support transformation in transdisciplinary research. More broadly, I am interested in gender issues and intersectionality in all its dimensions.

My research interests lie in the field of agricultural land planning. More specifically, my research aims to provide an improved decision-support tool for agricultural land planning at the meso-level. The tool combines multiple modeling methods, including LCA for environmental impact assessment, spatial optimization for generating optimized land planning scenarios, GIS for spatial data manipulation, and agent-based modeling for integrating individual behaviors.

Tom Bauler holds the Chair "Environment & Economics" at ULB, where he teaches and works in an ecological economics perspective. He is also co-director of the Interfaculty Institute for Socio-Environmental Transformations (iiTSE - https://iitse.site.ulb.be) and Research Advisor to the Vice-Rector for Sustainable Development at ULB.

Wouter Achten, bio-engineer land and forest management by formation, holds a chair “Environmental impact management” at the ULB. In the Master on Environmental Science and Management he mainly covers the impact assessment and management aspects of the curriculum, both in specific as multidisciplinary courses. His research activities are mainly focused on life cycle thinking, where he supports a research group covering both applied (environmental impact assessment of circular economy, food systems, waste management, bioenergy, etc.) as methodological research (LCA, LCSA, consequential LCA, S-LCA, IO-LCA, Territorial LCA, etc.).