2021-present: Postdoctoral Researcher, Environmental Geography Department, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
2016-2021: PhD candidate, Department of Industrial and Operations Engineering, University of Michigan
agriculture & food systems | resilience & transformation & equity
I have been involved in agent-based modelling since the early nineties with a consistent attention to methdological improvement, institutional development and empirical issues. My mission is that ABM should be a routinely accepted research method (with a robust methodology) across the social sciences. To this end I have built diverse models and participated in research projects across economics, law, medicine, psychology, anthropology and sociology. I took a DPhil in economics on adaptive firm behaviour and then was involved in two research projects on money management and farmer decision making. Since 2006 I have worked at the Department of Sociology (now the School of Media, Communication and Sociology) at the University of Leicester. I was involved in the founding of JASSS and (more recently RofASSS https://rofasss.org) and have regularly served on the review panels for international conferences in the ABM community.
Decision making, research design and research methods, social networks, innovation diffusion, secondhand markets.
Modeling land use change from smallholder agricultural intensification
Agricultural expansion in the rural tropics brings much needed economic and social development in developing countries. On the other hand, agricultural development can result in the clearing of biologically-diverse and carbon-rich forests. To achieve both development and conservation objectives, many government policies and initiatives support agricultural intensification, especially in smallholdings, as a way to increase crop production without expanding farmlands. However, little is understood regarding how different smallholders might respond to such investments for yield intensification. It is also unclear what factors might influence a smallholder’s land-use decision making process. In this proposed research, I will use a bottom-up approach to evaluate whether investments in yield intensification for smallholder farmers would really translate to sustainable land use in Indonesia. I will do so by combining socioeconomic and GIS data in an agent-based model (Land-Use Dynamic Simulator multi-agent simulation model). The outputs of my research will provide decision makers with new and contextualized information to assist them in designing agricultural policies to suit varying socioeconomic, geographic and environmental contexts.