Team

Aurore Fransolet is a researcher in the SOcio-eNvironmental dYnAmics Research Group (SONYA) of the Université libre de Bruxelles (ULB). She has an interdisciplinary background in chemistry (Ba, 2010 - Magna cum laude) and environmental science and management (Ma, 2013 - Magna cum laude). Since April 2019, she holds a PhD in environment from the Université libre de Bruxelles.

After my studies (MA environmental planning & MSc social-political philosophy, Universiteit van Amsterdam) and doctoral dissertation (transitions studies/public administration, Erasmus Universiteit Rotterdam) I joined SONYA/ the Centre d’Etudes du Développement Durable (CEDD) in 2014.

Celia is a PhD Candidate in Environmental Sciences at the ULB in collaboration with Sciensano, the Belgian Public Health Institute. Her PhD project, part of the INFORMAS network, consists on creating a policy index towards healthier, more sustainable and equal food systems. She is a nutritionist and public health specialist with a background in non-communicable diseases prevention interventions in Finland, Kenya and Ecuador.

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 postdoctoral, interdisciplinary researcher specialized in socio-ecological change in and from capitalist societies.

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.

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.

Romain Weikmans is a Senior Research Fellow at the Finnish Institute of International Affairs. His main research interests are related to global climate governance. He teaches various courses on environmental policies and politics at ULB. Romain is a contributing author to the 2020 UNEP Adaptation Gap Report and to the IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Report (WG2) to be published in 2021-2022.

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 holds a Master in Macroeconomics (2007, University of Strasbourg) and a Master in Environmental Management (2014, IGEAT/ULB). She joined IGEAT in 2015 to start a PhD thesis. Her research focused on the methodological development of Social Life Cycle Analysis, with a particular focus on Alternative Food Networks, and in collaboration with the COSY-Food project. She works since 2020 as a postdoc researcher for the GOSETE project, investigating exnovation processes in the Brussels Capital Region, from a sustainability assessment perspective.

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.).