Eveline van Leeuwen (AMS Institute & WUR): “Advanced Metropolitan Solutions: how to truly benefit from transdisciplinary research."

Abstract:
In this presentation, Eveline van Leeuwen, the Scientific Director of the Amsterdam Institute for Advanced Metropolitan Solutions (AMS), will introduce you to this unique Institute that is founded by Wageningen University (WUR), Technical University Delft (TUD) and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) with the municipality of Amsterdam. After the first 10 years of existence, the Institute has cocreated many big and small projects that landed in the Amsterdam region (for more than 200 million euro’s), host around 30 research fellows and collaborate with a much number of researchers and principal investigators at WUR/TUD/MIT, set-up and developed a MSc MADE (for which teachers form Wageningen and TUD go to Amsterdam to teach), and have successful start-up booster that guides students and other starting entrepreneurs in setting up a business. Everything we do, at the end needs to be relevant to both academia and to society. This means we allow for both more fundamental and empirical research, as well as experiments in the lab and in the city itself. Actually, working in living Labs is our signature method, that we develop in house and add to many research proposals. This is also one of the reasons that NOW/EU proposals developed in collaboration with AMS have relatively high success rates.

But why is it relevant to WUR and SSG? Because cities are places where a lot of impact is made, both positively and negatively, where choices are made by consumers, firms and governments, where new ideas diffuse and were scarcity is very high. We will also go into this, and there might be more opportunities to collaborate and benefit from what is happening at AMS than you thought.