This program year, we are excited to have four grantees in the Fulbright-Schuman European Union Affairs Program, a program managed by the Fulbright commission in Belgium that sends EU citizens to the US and US citizens to various EU countries. Below you can read more about the research projects our four Fulbright-Schuman grantees—two from Austria and two from the US—are pursuing with their grants.

The purpose of my project is to examine the implications of this “green race” mentality and associated protectionist tendencies for the global shift to a green economy by modelling country-level incentives to support and protect clean sectors in a game theoretic model. My faculty host at Columbia University is an authority in the field of modeling international climate cooperation using game theory and is able to provide crucial guidance that is not available at my home institution. Moreover, visiting a US institution allows me to experience US academic culture, forge new transatlantic professional relationships, and gain better insights into how people in the US think about issues related to trade and the climate.

There are very few places where a researcher can sit at the intersection of genomics, policy, and the history and philosophy of science. The Institute for Advanced Studies / Institut für Höhere Studien Wien has a robust team of scientists and philosophers, and the Science, Technology, and Social Transformation Research Group is studying responsible innovation, genomics, and science diplomacy, among many other topics—I primarily wanted to learn from and work alongside that team. Vienna is also the home to long-running diplomatic and scientific initiatives, as well as a home to the United Nations—this will provide contrast and context for the second semester of my grant, which will be spent in Brussels.

Apart from my semesters in Vienna and Brussels, I intend to take a few key trips to conduct interviews with experts and decision makers in the sciences, diplomacy, and the history of science, with the aim of gaining insight into the European and international systems. If all goes according to plan, this will include trips to Munich, Paris, Rome, and Copenhagen, but this will likely change as I learn more in the process of completing the grant and from my colleagues in Vienna and Brussels.

My work so far includes the environmental and economic optimization of bioenergy supply chains, quantifying potentially relevant developments of biochemical production, and analyzing the function and organization of energy commodity markets and multi-level governance discussions. My methods are characterized by interdisciplinary research, often based on the team efforts of co-authors from different European countries and the United States.

As I am pursuing my dream of an academic career, I have to face critical questions: What is the scientific added-value of my skill-set and theories, how can I sustainably contribute to societal and technological development and, first and foremost, how can I finance this work?

Distilling the essence of my relatively young career, the notion of quantifying the benefits of the strategic and robust involvement of the primary economic sectors—excluding coal mining and oil and gas extraction—comes to the fore. Agriculture, forestry, and the blue economy (e.g., algae) have much to offer in terms of food, material, energy, ecosystem and negative-emission services. These sectors can be further summarized as the “bioeconomy.” Energy system models are used to simulate potentially relevant futures, to inform coordinated action and strategic planning. But a novel set of tools is needed for these models to enable them to account for the systemic benefits of a bioeconomy designed for providing, for example, resilience and stake- and shareholder diversity. My goal is to establish a circular bioeconomy modeling group in Austria with a steady exchange of pre- and postdocs between the continents that can develop respective modeling tools and effectively distribute them among engaged scientists around the world.

At Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), I am part of the Sustainable Energy and Environmental Systems Department. The LBNL offers the optimal environment to develop the core concepts and ideas I have been working on and to assess their groundbreaking potential and feasibility. LBNL experts are excited to co-develop and crossbreed basic research questions, methodologies, and scientific practices while exploring differences and nuances between the EU- and US-specific approaches and realities. LBNL ties to the University of California and Stanford and my already established professional connections in the Idaho National Laboratory (INL) and the Department of Energy (DOA) increase the chances of generating high-impact results. This way, the Fulbright Schuman postdoctoral research grant helps me to pursue my ultimate dream.