Class of 2024
It is with great pleasure that we present the Class of 2024. Every year around 20 PhD-candidates from universities in the Netherlands and Belgium start with our PhD training program. Below the first PhD Candidates of the Class of 2024 introduce their PhD projects to you, throughout this year, more PhD candidates that join our training program will be featured on this page.
Jacob Alabab-Moser
Erasmus University Rotterdam
I am a PhD candidate from the Department of Public Administration and Sociology at the Erasmus University. My research focuses on national responses to labour market integration of migrants across the EU. I use mixed methods to map and explain variation in such responses between countries, paying special interest to the roles of organised interests and public officials in navigating intertemporal tensions. This project contributes to the literatures on comparative labor markets and interest group politics.
Lieke Bakker
Utrecht University
My PhD project is called “Zorg voor de Zorg”, which roughly translates to “Health for healthcare” in English. While work engagement among healthcare workers is relatively high, the Dutch healthcare sector faces a substantial amount of absenteeism due to illness and outflow of employees compared to other sectors. From a public administration perspective, my research focuses on why and how healthcare workers use healthcare and how, at the organizational level, changes can be made to better accommodate workers. Eventually, I hope to develop an intervention that can improve the workplaces within the healthcare sector and, in turn, the wellbeing of healthcare workers.
Linde Bekkers
Utrecht University
My name is Linde Bekkers and in September I joined Utrecht University as a Lecturer-PhD (in Dutch: docent-promovendus) at the Department of Public Administration and Organizational Sciences. My doctoral research focuses on “future design in the governance for climate change”, with a focus on empowering future generations within decision-making processes. I approach this topic through the lens of intergenerational solidarity, institutional trust and power dynamics. My research blends both classical quantitative and qualitative methods with creative and innovative approaches, such as applied theater. Drawing from my background as a theater maker, I integrate artistic practices into my research to make it (hopefully) more accessible and impactful to a wider audience.
Emma Brekelmans
Leiden University
The central aim of my research is to better understand the interactional dynamics between frontline professionals and citizen-clients in the context of the public encounter. My project takes an interdisciplinary approach and combines insights from Public Administration with Social-Psychology. Throughout this project, I take the perspectives of the frontline professional and citizen-client into account and focus on how the interactions, behavioural, and relational aspects explain or influence (satisfaction with) public service delivery. Since I work as a PhD-Fellow, I can devote almost 50% of my time to teaching activities next to managing my research project during the upcoming six years.
Claudio Buongiorno Sottoriva
Leiden University
I am a PhD candidate at the Institute of Public Administration at Leiden University and a research fellow at SDA Bocconi School of Management in Milan. My PhD research project focuses on recruitment, adopting a public management approach to study recruitment practices in public sector organizations. I hold a degree in Economics and Management of Public and International Organizations from Bocconi University in Milan. I am generally interested in public management and healthcare management. In particular, I study human resources management, access to services, and service design.
Maartje van Diest
Leiden University
Maartje van Diest is a PhD candidate at the Institute of Political Science at Leiden University. Her research focuses on how cultural perceptions among civil servants working for the European Commission influence both inter- and intra-organizational cooperation. In her PhD project, Maartje adopts an interdisciplinary framework, synthesizing theoretical perspectives from social psychology, political science, and public administration. Methodologically, she employs a mixed-methods design, incorporating qualitative techniques, such as interviews, alongside quantitative approaches, including survey experiments. Her PhD is part of the broader ERC-funded project “EUROTYPES,” led by Dr. Adina Akbik.
Danique Francois
Leiden University
My name is Danique François, and I am a PhD fellow at the Institute of Public Administration at Leiden University. My research interests center around bureaucratic structures and political-administrative relationships. As part of my responsibilities as a PhD fellow, I will allocate a significant amount of time to teaching.
Manou Gomlich
Erasmus University Rotterdam
As a PhD candidate in the Department of Public Administration and Sociology, my research project focuses on the dilemmas of street level policymaking. Using mixed methods, I interpretively investigate how and why street level workers' policy implementation practices differ across diverse urban communities, aiming to contribute to the broader understanding of how stigmatization as well as discrimination inform policymaking at the street level.
Wies van der Heijden
Erasmus University Rotterdam
My name is Wies van der Heijden, and I am a PhD candidate at the Erasmus School of Health Policy and Management. My research focuses on the implementation of healthy urban environments and is part of the CITY-MOVE project, involving six different cities across three different continents. I will employ mixed methods, including participatory action research and quantitative methods to develop living labs and a multi-criteria decision analysis tool to guide healthy urban governance. This research aims to contribute to urban environments that are healthy for both people and planet.
Silke Herms
Leiden University
I am a PhD candidate at the Institute of Public Administration at Leiden University. My research focuses on the effect of polarization on bureaucratic responsiveness and quality of governance. I will be looking at the ways in which political pressure and political decision-making affect the relationship between polarization and responsiveness. This project is in collaboration with the Province of South Holland and is therefore also intended to provide policy makers with tools to use political-administrative dynamics to make themselves more resilient to political polarization and thereby improve the quality of policy.
Sanne van Herwijnen
Delft University of Technology
In the context of mobility, it is crucial to recognise that the transport system’s impact extends beyond positive implications, affecting a wide range of public values. While mobility drives economic growth and enhances connectivity, it also contributes to environmental degradation, social inequities, and spatial fragmentation. My PhD research addresses challenges of compartmentalised decision-making of infrastructures. By examining critical nexuses, such as mobility’s connections with energy, climate, and space, I aim to explore how governance innovations can address sectoral and multi-level compartmentalisation, enabling the integration of key public values into decision-making processes.
Josien Kamp
Erasmus University Rotterdam
Major societal issues like climate change and social inequality are often addressed through large, programmatic policy agendas, but are felt and experienced on the local level. On this neighborhood level, a relatively large part of the Dutch population is involved in (in)formal community initiatives. These groups often address concerns and issues regarding sustainability challenges by doing, by taking action together. Through an action-oriented research approach, we aim to understand how people in communities in the Rotterdam-South region relate to each other, take care of themselves and their environment, what their underlying values are and how narratives of their practice relate to the institutional landscape.
Jasper Kars
Utrecht University
Power through AI by the People? Democracies around the world are encountering an increasing array of issues associated with the widespread use of digital technologies. The rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI) marks a new chapter in this transformation. My research is founded on the idea that there needs to be a thorough investigation into the transformative potential of AI technology and its interplay with democracy. It examines emerging empirical material (e.g., emerging political debates on AI, government efforts to shape AI governance, and public deliberation around AI) through a socio-technical perspective, considering the technological and democratic dimensions (polity, politics, policy, and polis) of AI development and use, and their mutual influence. Recognizing the critical discourse around AI and calls for a more inclusive development process, this research explores the broader socio-technical implications and focuses on governmental efforts to make AI more democratic, providing insights into AI's transformative potential.
Tafadzwa Karuma
University of Twente
I am Tafadzwa Karuma. I am a PhD researcher in the section of Public Administration in consortium with the Health Technology and Services Research section within the faculty of Behavioral Management and Social Sciences at Twente University. I will be conducting research to analyze the transformations in street-level professionals’ roles and identities in the era of digitalized societies and public service organizations. I will delve into virtual care as a case for reviewing the current knowledge gaps in the implementation of virtual care, the implications on professionals and the impact of virtual care.
Maike Klip Veltman
Delft University of Technology
How can we design government services that are good for (the) people? This question is central to my PhD research at the Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering at TU Delft. Collaborating with organizations like DUO and CJIB, I aim to integrate human-centered design into government practice and explore necessary changes within these institutions as well as to design methodologies. I draw on design literature, public administration, and service research in a multidisciplinary approach. As an action researcher, I actively engage with the organizations involved. I share insights about my research process on my blog klipklaar.nl and in a monthly newsletter.
Catarina Mantas
Leiden University
My research explores public managers’ search distance and sequence in solving and understanding societal problems. Through a combination of experimental and eye-tracking studies in local government settings, it aims to shed light on how both these search processes are impacted by performance and political-level variables. By doing so, it contributes to several organizational theories. These include the behavioral theory of the firm, in the first place, but also performance feedback theory and organizational learning theory. The relevance of my research arises from the fact that the way in which public managers search to solve or understand issues largely determines how and whether those are addressed.
Jinke Oostvogel
Leiden University
My name is Jinke Oostvogel, and I am a PhD candidate at the institute of Public Administration at Leiden University. My research is part of the AI4MRI-lab in the ROBUST program on Trustworthy AI-based Systems for Sustainable Growth. I will be focussing on the implementation of AI in healthcare practice.
Carlos David Rivera-Chosco
University of Twente
Climate change prompts fundamental changes in our built environment and infrastructure systems. A complex and diverse socio-technical and ecological configuration of assets, actors, values, institutions, policies and practices determine how the built environment is designed, planned, constructed, managed, renewed and demolished. Currently, this complex socio-technical configuration deals with these societal challenges in a sectoral way, where each discipline domain is managed by actors within the domain, without considering possible cascading effects in other domains. Within the planning and implementation processes of these societal challenges, the potential to develop solutions that contribute to solving multiple societal challenges at the same time arises. However, capitalizing on this integrative potential is currently not the status; while the merits of an integrative approach are recognized by both practitioners and scholars. In fact, integration currently faces different obstacles at the different levels of action such as limiting policies and regulations, overlapping functions, and different visions and interests. Therefore, more knowledge on how to develop and implement these integrated approaches to address better Climate Change related challenges is needed. In this context, I am currently doing my PHD at University of Twente (Department of Construction Management, Faculty of Engineering Technology) on how to design and implement Integrated Actions to curb climate change in the built environment.
Richard Spithoff
Erasmus University Rotterdam
Health systems face significant challenges, including increasing demand for care, rising costs, and shortages in health workforce. These challenges are further exacerbated by influences outside the health system that affect health, such as changes in the living environment, social determinants of health, and the effects of natural systems on health. Traditional, individual-centred forms of leadership and governance are insufficient to address these complex and cross-sectoral challenges. Shared leadership, a systemic approach to leadership and governance that emphasises shared tasks and responsibilities, mutual influence, and collaboration, is better suited to such complex challenges. In my research at the Erasmus School of Health Policy & Management (ESHPM), I focus on how shared leadership manifests in practice and how it can be conceptualised, with particular emphasis on (healthcare) executives and the policy context.
Dominik Tkalčić
University of Twente
My name is Dominik Tkalčić, and I am a PhD candidate in the section for Public Administration at the University of Twente. My PhD project aims to address the significant challenges in public service delivery in border regions, which face substantial issues due to resource constraints and inefficiencies. Sectors such as healthcare suffer from shortages and fragmented management. The lack of coordinate, sustainable strategies for efficient resource allocation becomes especially evident in times of crises. In alignment with the BRIDGE project, my research will explore innovative, technology-driven approaches to enable resource pooling and coordination across borders.