Staff

Andrew Hattle – Research Assistant

Andrew is one of the Lab’s research assistants and originally comes from the UK. He holds an MSc in Climate Change Impacts, Adaptation, and Mitigation from the University of Copenhagen. His dissertation studied the framing and agenda-setting roles of climate change news media across socioeconomic contexts. Prior to that, Andrew’s academic background was in Chemistry, and he holds an MChem from the University of Manchester. Here he wrote his dissertation on two-dimensional materials akin to graphene. More recently, Andrew worked as a consultant focused on international cooperation under the UNFCCC and equity under the Paris Agreement. Working with governments and civil society organisations, he analysed the quality and quantity of financial contributions to the global South for climate and development objectives.

Cynthia Flores Santana – Research Assistant

Cynthia comes from Mexico and has worked on various topics around sustainability, such as sustainable food systems, waste flow analysis, and agri-food and consumer-goods sector compliance, among others. She also worked as a research assistant at the FABLE Consortium from the Food and Land Use Coalition. Not knowing that Industrial Ecology was a scientific discipline but confident that nature is the central piece, she co-founded a small think tank focused on industrial ecology applied in Mexico. She did her Bachelor’s in Industrial Engineering (2012) at the National Polytechnic Institute. Additionally, she has a master’s degree in Industrial Ecology (2019) from Leiden University and the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands. In her master’s thesis, she conducted qualitative research focused on energy poverty and ecotechnologies in Mexico.

Carl Folke – Chair

Professor Carl Folke is Director of the Beijer Institute, Founder and Chair of the Scientific Committee of the Anthropocene Laboratory, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, and Founder and Chair of the Board of the Stockholm Resilience Centre, Stockholm University, Sweden. He is a systems thinker in integrative science for sustainability with a focus on social-ecological systems, resilience, and how progress, prosperity and well-being will benefit from reconnecting development to the biosphere foundation. He has a long record of science, policy, and practice collaboration, working with key actors from local landscapes to international bodies and transnational corporations, and is genuinely engaged in the arts-science interface. He is an elected member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and has received international recognition, like the Planet and Humanity Medal, the Gunnerus Sustainability Science Award, and the Heineken Prize for Environmental Sciences.

Francisco Gelves-Gomez – Visiting Scientist

Francisco is an Environmental Geographer whose research interests lie at the natural and social sciences interface. Much of his work is focused on critical aspects of biodiversity conservation, the production of knowledge about the environment, and how this knowledge is shaped by and influences the world we live in. His research has delved into the various ways in which human interactions with the natural world are conceived and enacted. He also studies complex socio-ecological systems, more-than-human geographies, and the application of these forms of thinking for the management and governance of land and sea.

Oscar Hartman Davies – Visiting Scientist

Oscar is a Social Sciences Engagement Fellow at the School of Geography and the Environment, University of Oxford, and a visiting researcher at the Lab and the KTH Centre for Anthropocene History. He is an environmental and cultural geographer whose research primarily considers the environmental governance implications of digital sensing technologies, in contexts spanning seabird conservation and marine protected area governance, sewage pollution monitoring in the UK, and landscape connectivity corridors. His current fellowship involves developing participatory governance processes within Youngwilders, a youth-led nature recovery organisation he co-founded, which works to empower the next generation of environmental stewards in the UK. Through his affiliation with Puistokatu 4: A Space for Science and Hope in Helsinki, he is working collaboratively to develop a similar approach in Finland.

Peter Søgaard Jørgensen – Mentor

Peter has a background in ecology and evolution with studies at the University of Copenhagen (PhD, 2014) and the University of California at Davis and Berkeley. He is interested in the evolution of sustainability in the Anthropocene. Case studies include global health and human interactions with some of the Earth’s oldest inhabitants, microorganisms e.g., in the form of antibiotic resistance, new diseases, or agricultural problem species. General studies include his current work on an ‘Anthropocene synthesis’ combining methods and insights from across the sciences and humanities for the past, present and future of the human-Earth system. He’s currently a theme leader of Anthropocene Dynamics at the Stockholm Resilience Centre at Stockholm University and Deputy Executive Director of the Global Economic Dynamics and Biosphere programme at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.

Chelsea Kaandorp – Postdoc

Chelsea Kaandorp is a postdoctoral researcher at the Anthropocene Lab. In her work, she strives to develop and share knowledge on climate change mitigation strategies for improving water resource management and environmental justice. She does so by combining perspectives from different research fields. In 2016, she obtained her master’s degree in Theoretical Physics from the University of Cambridge, followed by a master’s degree in Cultural Anthropology from Utrecht University in 2018. For her master’s thesis in Cultural Anthropology, she performed an ethnographic study on how notions of global climate change and local deforestation in the Kilimanjaro region in Tanzania connect to the hydrosocial cycle. In her PhD research, she studied strategies for the decarbonisation of the built environment in her hometown, the city of Amsterdam, from the perspectives of the Water-Energy Nexus, committed emissions, energy justice and the urban commons.

Kayoko Kumasaka – Activities Coordinator

As Activities Coordinator, Kayoko provides the team with administrative support. Her main focus is on daily office management, event preparation, budget monitoring, external and internal communication, and supporting long-term planning of the Anthropocene Laboratory. She is grateful to work with such inspiring team members and colleagues at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. Kayoko has previously worked as a program coordinator in universities in Japan, and has extensive experience working in a start-up environment. She earned her Master’s degree in Sustainability Science from Lund University.

Dianty Ningrum – Postdoc

Dianty Ningrum is a postdoctoral researcher at the Anthropocene Laboratory working on the Empirics of Hope topic. She is from Indonesia. Her current and previous works involve looking at pressing societal issues from an interdisciplinary social science perspective. She has degrees in Social Development and Welfare (Universitas Gadjah Mada), Global Urban Development and Planning (The University of Manchester) and Sustainability (Monash Sustainable Development Institute). Her research portfolio includes the local governance of the Sustainable Development Goals in Australia, river revitalisation to support riverine communities in West Java, and asset management of kampung residents facing eviction and environmental challenges in Jakarta. Beyond academia, she has worked in public, private and non-profit sectors in Indonesia working on projects in social policy, innovation, and sustainability.

Henrik Österblom – Director

Henrik Österblom is professor of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and director of the Anthropocene Laboratory. He has a master’s degree in behavioral ecology from Uppsala University (1998), and a PhD in marine ecology from Stockholm University (2006). He has worked at the University of Tasmania (2009), the University of British Columbia (2009 and 2010) and the University of Tokyo (2017 and 2021). He is member of the scientific advisory council to the RIKEN Institute (Japan), chair of the Natural Capital Partnership Committee (Stanford University), chair of the SeaBOS fundraising foundation and board member of Race for the Baltic fundraising foundation. Henrik has served as Science Director of the Stockholm Resilience Centre, scientific advisor to the SARAS Institute (Uruguay) and as policy advisor to the Swedish government. He enjoys working across scientific disciplines, with artists, corporations, and policy makers. He was promoted to professor of environmental science at Stockholm University in 2018.

Juan Rocha – Mentor

Juan C. Rocha is a research scientist at the Stockholm Resilience Centre where he co-leads the theme on complex systems. His research questions are oriented to understanding critical transitions: from regime shifts in ecological systems to collective action in society. Currently, he focuses on the idea of cascading effects: how a critical transition in an ecosystem in the world can impact the likelihood of other ecosystems tipping over. Juan is interested in methods for identifying resilience surrogates –good observables that can tell you how resilient a system is– as well as misperceptions of feedbacks and their consequences. He finds inspiration in complex systems science, the use of mathematical models, networks and other computational methods to understand social and ecological complexity.

Caroline Schill – Mentor

Caroline is a researcher at the Beijer Institute of Ecological Economics at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, where she is part of the ‘Behaviour, Economics and Nature’ research programme. She is interested in the complexities of human behaviour in relation to sustainability issues. One of her core interests is to gain empirically-grounded understanding of human behaviour and collective action in the face of global environmental change, inherent uncertainties and tipping points, and social inequalities more recently. Her interdisciplinary work is aimed at developing more realistic assumptions of human behaviour, grounded in complexity and systems thinking, and building on methods and insights from sustainability science, behavioural economics, and psychology. She is co-lead of the theme ‘Interacting Complexities’ at the Stockholm Resilience Centre at Stockholm University, where she earned her PhD in Sustainability Science in 2017. She is also one of two mentors for the ‘Empirics of Hope’ topic at the Anthropocene Laboratory.

Lan Wang-Erlandsson – Mentor

Lan Wang-Erlandsson is a researcher at the Stockholm Resilience Centre where she is part of the Planetary Boundaries group and co-leads the theme on Anthropocene Dynamics. Her research focuses on the large-scale interactions between land, water, and climate, and their implications for social-ecological and Earth system resilience. Research questions that she explores include: What is the role of land-use for sustaining rainfall? What is the role of root adaptation for rainforest resilience under climate change? What is the role of freshwater for the resilience of climate change mitigation measures? She earned her MSc degree in civil engineering from KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden (2009) and her PhD degree in global hydrology from Delft University of Technology, the Netherlands (2017). She has also been a postdoctoral fellow at the Research Institute for Humanity and Nature in Kyoto, Japan.