dr.ir. EN (Erika) Speelman

In today’s complex world, people are increasingly challenged to adapt to changing social-ecological conditions and find collective solutions.

Trained as a tropical agronomist with a MSc and PhD degree from Wageningen University, my goal in research and development is to gain new scientific insights and develop new tools to help stakeholders, in particular smallholder farmers in the Global South, to become more resilient to ongoing social-ecological change. Contributing to solutions of large societal issues such as environmental degradation, poverty, climate change, inequality, is what drives me as a researcher and is the determining factor for my geographical research focus on tropical contested landscapes.

My expertise and vision is to develop and explore simulation and gaming tools as boundary objects to bring stakeholders together to communicate and develop shared solutions for complex landscape management.

I have a broad experience working for local NGO’s, UN, academic institutions in Europe, Asia and Latin America. By interacting easily with different stakeholders, I quickly understand the broader scope & institutional interplay. I have an open communication style and a broad network in the field which allows me to easily build bridges between parties.

In my current role as Associate professor at the laboratory of Geo-Information Science and Remote Sensing within the Environmental Sciences group at Wageningen University, I am one of the leaders of the INREF SESAM programme (2020-2025) with 15 PhD candidates and 2 PostDocs. I coordinate and teach several MSc courses in the field of geo-information science and several PhD courses on inter- and transdisciplinary research in collaboration with PE&RC. In addition I supervise MSc and PhD students.