Team & Advisory Board

Bodo Steiner (Chairman of the board, previously advisory board member since 2016) is Professor of Food Economics and Business Management at the University of Helsinki, Head of the Research Group Management & Organizations For Sustainable Food Systems. He received his PhD from the University of Reading and has previously held teaching positions and visiting professorships at the University of California Berkeley, the University of Alberta, University College Cork, the University of Southern Denmark, Kiel University, and Beijing Normal University. His current research and teaching interests focus on organizational sustainability, particularly social capital, common good, social sustainability in food systems and value chains, and circular economy strategies.

Pia Popal is Professor of Management of Socio-Ecological Transformation and Strategic Communication, with the following areas of expertise and responsibilities: Migration and development, Organizational development and change management, Management of social innovations, Methods of empirical social research, Research on sustainable development, Shaping societal transformation processes; teaching areas: Socio-Ecological Transformation and Strategic Communication.

Marie Ludwig (Senior Researcher)studied Applied Environmental Sciences at the University of Trier, where she subsequently obtained her PhD and worked for several years as a research associate in the Department of Soil Science. After longer stays in China and working at Beijing Forestry University (Beijing), she worked as a freelancer for the Geoverbund of Forschungszentrum Jülich. From 2016, this was followed by a postdoctoral position in the Thünen Institute for Biodiversity in Braunschweig, Germany. From early 2018 to 2019, she worked as a soil scientist and resilience researcher for the Biostiftung Schweiz in Arlesheim. Since 2020, she is Science Manager of the Institute for Agrosphere (IBG-3) at the Research Center Jülich, Germany. Her involvement with Insitute is one of her interdisciplinary collaborations in resilience research. She aims to better link the natural science level with the sociological level of resilience, in order to be able to investigate the connection between resilience of people and soils.

Michael-Volker Jäger is the founder of IGWW e.V. and was its scientific director and Chairman of the board until the end of 2021.

Ulrich Hoffrage is Professor of Decision Theory at the Department of Organizational Behavior, Faculty of Business and Economics (HEC), University of Lausanne. His research interests include judgment and decision making (in particular: ethical, managerial, consumer, medical, and group decision making) and simple heuristics as models of bounded rationality. He has also contributed to the literature on cognitive illusions (e.g., overconfidence and hindsight bias), risk communication, and decision support systems. He is fascinated by the complex interaction between the co-evolution of individuals and their environment. He has published in journals such as Science, Psychological Review, and Psychological Bulletin, and his research (about 100 publications) has received international attention (> 15000 citations in google scholar). He studied psychology in Konstanz (Germany) and received his PhD in Salzburg (Austria). Before joining HEC Lausanne in 2004, he was a senior researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development (Berlin). He has been an advisory board member since the foundation of the Institute.

Virginia Enssle is Project and Policy officer at Fair Trade Advocacy Office, originally from Chile, graduated and worked as an International Trade and Commercial Law Lawyer in Chile. Later on, Virginia obtained a master’s degree in Public International Law from the University of Groningen; developing research on International Investment Law and margin of manœuvre for countries in the Global South. Currently, Virginia focuses their advocacy work on EU trade policy and agri-food issues; pushing for promotion of EU policies that promote Fair Trade values and practices and that enable a global fair ecological transition. Virginia has past experience in human rights and migrants and refugees. Virginia serves as member representing FTAO in several international trade and agri-food supply chains CSOs. Virginia is International and Institutional Relations Manager at FTAO since 2020, a Joint Fair Trade movement political advocacy initiative, based in Brussels.

Galina Hale is Professor of Economics at UC Santa Cruz and co-founding member of Food System Innovations (FSI). She served as a Research Advisor at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, and an assistant professor in the economics department of Yale University. Galina’s research interests lie in three main areas: understanding patterns of international capital flows, stability of the financial system, and the nexus between ESG sustainability goals and financial system.  Galina has published her work in highly rated economics and finance journals.  Galina is a director of the CEBRA’s IFM program and a co-director of the UCSC Center for Analytical Finance (CAFIN).   Galina has been recently working on ways economists can inform policymakers on how to make the food system more sustainable. She serves on editorial boards of a number of Economics journals and on multiple boards and committees in animal welfare and animal agriculture space. 

Sylvia Kay joined the Transnational Institute in 2011 as a researcher and project coordinator working on issues related to agrarian and environmental justice, food systems, land and natural resource politics. She is the lead author of an official European Parliament commissioned study on land grabbing in Europe and has contributed to a number of academic books, including the Handbook on International Political Economy of Production (Edward Elgar, 2015). She holds an MSc. in Global Politics from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE).

Stefan Guldenberg is Full Professor at EHL Hospitality Business School, Lausanne, Switzerland and Academic Director at EHL’s Graduate School. He studied economic mathematics, philosophy and English at the University of Ulm, received his doctorate and his habilitation at the Vienna University of Economics and Business (WU). Prior to joining the EHL, Stefan Güldenberg worked as a full professor of international management and director of the Institute of Entrepreneurship at the University of Liechtenstein, as a professor and director of the Institute for Human Resources and Organisation at the WHL (Lahr University of Applied Sciences) and as a professor of strategic management and corporate management at Vienna University of Economics and Business Management. Visiting professorships abroad have taken him to Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the National University of Singapore. He is the specialization director of the EHL’s Master’s degree CSR & Sustainable Transformation Specialization with  Common Good applications.