Eric has graduate degrees in urban planning and policy and sociology and an undergraduate degree in biology. He has worked on multiple collaborative and interdisciplinary projects and is skilled at engaging communities and other stakeholders. He is adept at qualitative research and has earned a Certificate in Geospatial Analysis and Visualization, demonstrating proficiency in Adobe Suite, ArcGIS, agent-based modeling and system dynamics modeling. He is currently writing manuscripts for publication based on his work on motivating energy retrofit decisions, energy-related urban planning, municipal decision-making on infrastructure investments, and other work on resilience and sustainability.

Amineh Ghorbani is an assistant professor at the Engineering Systems and Services Department, Delft University of Technology, the Netherlands. She is also an affiliated member of the “Institutions for Collective Action” at Utrecht University. She obtained her M.Sc. in Computer Science (Artificial intelligence) from University of Tehran (Iran) (2009, honours) and her PhD from Delft University of Technology (2013, cum laude).

During her PhD, Amineh developed a meta-model for agent-based modelling, called MAIA, which describes various concepts and relations in a socio-technical system. This modelling perspective helped her develop a modelling paradigm that she refers to as institutional modelling.

Her current area of research is understanding the emergence and dynamics of institutions (set of rule organizing human society) using modelling. She is interested in how bottom-up collective action emerges and how institutions emergence and change within communities.