Dr. Thomas Bauwens is an Assistant Professor researching collective action for sustainability at Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University.
He is specialized in sustainability and energy issues with a pronounced interest in multi-disciplinarity. His research concerns the conditions conducive to the creation of effective collective solutions to the social, economic, and environmental grand challenges of our times. He combines insights from geography, institutional economics, and organization studies to create new theoretical frameworks and empirical insights.
He was recently awarded a €1.5m Starting Grant from the European Research Council for the ambitious, five-year research project “SCENSUS” (“Scaling the Societal Impact of Community Enterprises for Sustainability”).
Before joining RSM, Thomas worked in the Utrecht University’s Copernicus Institute of Sustainable Development, where he led research and taught on circular economy, energy communities and sustainability transitions. Before that, he was a researcher at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne and at Oxford University. He holds a PhD in Economics and Management from HEC Management School, University of Liege, Belgium, and a MSc in Economics from the Economic School of Louvain, University of Louvain, Belgium.