Elisabeth Krueger is an Assistant Professor at the Department for Ecosystem and Landscape Dynamics (ELD), Institute for Biodiversity and Ecosystem Dynamics (IBED) in UvA’s Faculty of Natural Sciences. As an interdisciplinary scientist, she also contributes to research at the Governance and Inclusive Development group (GID) at the Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences (FMG).

Elisabeth teaches in the Master Earth Sciences programme, where she coordinates the Human-Environment Interactions (HEI) course, served as coordinator of the Environmental Management track from 2023-2025 and is currently coordinator of the Science for Sustainability Minor. In the new Master programme Complex Systems and Policy, she serves on the Examinations Board and coordinates and teaches in the Challenge-Based course on food, health, and sustainability. She also teaches the second-year Bachelor courses Water Management and Water Governance of Aquatic Resources and Environments in the Bachelor programme Future Planet Studies. Elisabeth currently supervises several Master theses and PhD projects (see ‘Research’ for more information).

She is a member of UvA’s Sustainability Platform (USP), SEVEN, and Do More for Water, and actively participates in seminars and workshops of the Institute for Advanced Studies (IAS) and the POLDER Center. She is also an initiator of the Earth Resilience and Sustainability Initiative (ERSI) and a member of the Society for Social-Ecological Systems (SocSES). Her own research group at UvA (Social-Environmental Systems group) is a shared learning environment in which graduate, undergraduate, and PostDoc researchers share their work in progress and learn from each other by giving and receiving feedback. She co-chairs the IBED research group on Human-Environment Interactions, a group of faculty members and their PhD/PostDoc researchers working on further developing concepts, methods and research projects on the theme of Human-Environment Interactions. She also initiated the Urban Water Group, which involves multiple UvA groups at IBED and the Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences, in which PhD, PostDoc and faculty members share their work related to urban water research.

Elisabeth has a background in environmental hydrology (MSc, University of Freiburg, Germany), and a PhD (Purdue University, USA), during which she developed an integrated framework investigating urban water supply security in cities across the world, and analysed their resilience, sustainability and dynamics driven by the interaction of biophysical and human systems. During her Postdoc at the High Meadows Environmental Institute at Princeton University, she worked on the governance of urban sustainability transformations and on understanding human perceptions and behaviour in resource-constrained and resource-abundant environments.

She spent six years working in the strategic development of international relations and interdisciplinary water research at the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research – UFZ in Germany, and one year working in an environmental NGO in France (Alsace) coordinating non-governmental stakeholders along the Rhine River.

I am interested in understanding ethnic and socio-economic inequalities in health and health behaviour with an aim to informing (policy) interventions to address said inequalities. Alongside traditional epidemiological and qualitative research methods, I have increasingly been involved in studies that make use of complex systems approaches.

Determinants of health behaviour, specifically dietary patterns: I am particularly interested in factors such as culture, cultural change and socio-economic position.

A current project asks: How can we transition towards healthy and sustainable dietary patterns while accounting for diverse sociocultural perspectives so that no-one in society is left behind? How do individual and contextual factors interact to drive behaviour and health?  

Systems Approach: I am intrigued by the interaction between determinants of health behaviour at the individual level with the broader physical and social environment. Health behaviour is an outcome of interdependent factors that interact with each other at multiple levels. For example, social processes are likely to shape the behaviours of individuals (try saying no to birthday cake!); the physical environment may have different effects on the diet quality of some individuals, depending on their knowledge, financial situation etc. Understanding the mechanisms underlying these interactions is key to understanding the social patterning of health behaviour and, ultimately, chronic disease risk. 

Questions that I’m currently engaging with include: How can we best apply complex system methodologies to understand the emergence of inequalities in health behaviour and health in diverse populations? How can we harness the insights offered by this approach to realise change at deeper system levels?

Dr. Lies Jacobs is an Assistant Professor at the Institute for Biodiversity and Ecosystem Dynamics in the Faculty of Science at the University of Amsterdam. Her academic journey combines expertise in physical geography, advanced remote sensing, spatio-temporal modelling, and citizen science, reflecting a strong commitment to addressing complex socio-environmental problems with interdisciplinary methods. She holds a PhD in physical geography and has developed a research profile that transcends traditional disciplinary boundaries, integrating large-scale geographic data, crowd-sourced information, and environmental risk modelling to gain deeper insights into human-environment interactions.

Lies’s research recognises that environmental systems are inherently complex, where simple, unidirectional explanations fall short of capturing the interwoven dynamics of natural hazards, climate impacts, and human responses. She has led and contributed to a range of projects that explore spatio-temporal dynamics of phenomena such as vector-borne diseases, natural hazards like landslides, and the distribution of microplastics in the environment. In doing so, she employs high-resolution remote sensing, geographic information systems (GIS), and novel forms of data collection including citizen science, which invites public participation into scientific research and helps bridge science and society.

Her recent publications demonstrate this breadth and depth: studies on how crowdsourced data can enhance environmental monitoring in data-scarce regions; work on landslide susceptibility and sediment dynamics in African landscapes; and contributions to understanding how citizen scientists can help map disease transmission risks. These outputs reflect her commitment to transdisciplinary research design that not only models environmental risks quantitatively but also grapples with the social dimensions of data quality, inclusion, and sustainability transformations.

For a team engaged in Complex Systems and Policy, Lies brings a perspective rooted in the systems thinking necessary to understand and address pressing environmental challenges. Her work exemplifies how integrating diverse data sources and engaging broader communities can reveal hidden structures and dynamics within complex environmental systems, informing policy debates about resilience, risk management, and sustainable development.

Dr. Wilma Waterlander is an Assistant Professor in Public & Occupational Health at Amsterdam UMC whose research focuses on public health challenges through a whole-of-systems lens, especially the prevention of obesity and non-communicable diseases by studying food systems and food policy. Her work is characterised by an integrative approach that recognises the complex adaptive nature of food environments and health behaviours, and she is highly engaged at the interface between science, policy, and society. She has established herself as a leading voice in systems approaches to public health, evident both in her academic contributions and her participation in national and international scientific commissions such as the Lancet Commission on Obesity.

Wilma’s academic trajectory includes a PhD completed in June 2012, during which she rigorously examined the feasibility and effectiveness of food pricing strategies — such as sugar taxes and fruit and vegetable subsidies — on consumer purchasing behaviour. Her doctoral research combined field experiments in real Dutch supermarkets with innovative methods, including the development of a 3-D Virtual Supermarket, and earned the VU University Prize for societal impact. This work directly informed advisory reports to the Dutch Ministry of Health on the potential use of food taxes and subsidies to promote healthier diets.

After her PhD, Wilma spent approximately six years as a postdoctoral and senior researcher at the University of Auckland in New Zealand. There she expanded her work to link public health nutrition with broader systemic issues such as climate change, and investigated food value chains to uncover leverage points for policy action. Her research during this period was supported by competitive funding, including a Heart Foundation Fellowship and a Health Research Council grant, and she actively contributed to international collaborations on food systems and sustainability.

At Amsterdam UMC, Wilma is a core member of the multidisciplinary team leading the LIKE (Lifestyle Innovations based on Youth’s Knowledge and Experience) project, which applies participatory system dynamics to understand and transform the drivers of unhealthy behaviours among 10–14-year-olds in multi-ethnic, lower-SES neighbourhoods in Amsterdam-East. This project integrates co-creation with children and key stakeholders to develop, implement, and evaluate adaptive interventions across family, school, neighbourhood, and city contexts — a vivid example of applying complexity theory to real-world public health problems.

Beyond LIKE, Wilma contributes to a variety of applied research initiatives, including supermarket nudging and pricing interventions, explorations of options for local government regulation of food environments, and projects that consider public health and environmental sustainability together. She is also active in science communication, regularly engaging with national and international media to bring systems perspectives on food policy and health to wider audiences.

For a team engaged in Complex Systems and Policy, Wilma Waterlander brings a profound understanding of how complex food systems interact with social, economic, and political drivers, and how systems approaches — including participatory modelling, system dynamics, and multi-level interventions — can generate actionable insights for policy and practice. Her blend of methodological innovation, policy engagement, and societal impact makes her research deeply relevant to the intellectual goals of complexity-inspired policy education.

Dr. Luc Hagenaars is a public health researcher whose work sits squarely at the intersection of policy, political economy, and complex systems thinking. His research is driven by a fascination with the commercial determinants of health: the ways in which corporate actors, markets, and business models shape population health outcomes. Trained across multiple disciplines — including public policy analysis, political science, health economics, epidemiology, and systems science — Luc has developed a strongly interdisciplinary profile, combining qualitative and policy-oriented methods such as archival research, case studies, system mapping, and applied policy process theory to study industries ranging from food and alcohol to pharmaceuticals, and practices ranging from lobbying and marketing to scientific conflicts of interest.

A central theme across Luc’s work is that public health challenges such as obesity, unhealthy consumption, and health inequalities are not isolated problems, but emergent outcomes of tightly coupled social, economic, and political systems. This is reflected in a substantial body of recent publications that explicitly engage with complexity and systems perspectives. He has co-authored system maps of the societal dynamics driving obesity in deprived urban neighbourhoods, analysed how commercial and political feedbacks contribute to policy inertia, and examined how industry influence shapes scientific agendas, public discourse, and regulatory outcomes. His 2024 and 2025 papers in journals such as Obesity Reviews, BMC Medicine, Public Health Nutrition, BMJ, and the International Journal of Health Policy and Management show a consistent effort to move beyond linear explanations, highlighting non-linear causation, institutional lock-ins, and the role of power and framing in complex policy systems.

Luc’s work is also strongly grounded in real-world policy practice. He has professional experience at the Dutch Ministry of Health and as a Harkness Fellow in the United States, where he engaged closely with policymakers, public institutions, and civil society actors. These experiences inform his academic focus on how policies are actually made, blocked, or reshaped in contested environments. His studies of soda taxes, procurement contracts in public universities, healthy checkout policies, and public–private partnerships illustrate how governance arrangements, commercial strategies, and public narratives interact to stabilize or disrupt unhealthy systems.

For a team working on Complex Systems and Policy, Luc brings a perspective that directly connects complexity science with political economy and governance. His research treats industries, institutions, and belief systems as interacting subsystems, producing path dependence, resistance to change, and occasionally windows of opportunity for transformation. He offers students and colleagues a way of thinking about policy not only as design and implementation, but as intervention in evolving systems of power, incentives, norms, and knowledge — a perspective that is highly aligned with the intellectual core of a complex systems and policy programme.

Dr. Loes Crielaard is a postdoctoral researcher and research associate in Public and Occupational Health at Amsterdam UMC and the University of Amsterdam, where her work sits at the forefront of applying complex systems science and computational modelling to public health challenges. She completed her PhD with distinction — earning a cum laude degree for her thesis on how complexity science reshapes understanding of health inequalities — an achievement that highlights both her intellectual depth and her methodological innovation. Her doctoral research explored feedback loops and dynamic interactions between social environments and individual behaviour, foregrounding complexity science as a guiding paradigm for public health research.

Loes’s research focuses on moving beyond descriptive system mapping towards analytical and computational models that can support policy development and intervention design. Her recent publications reflect this orientation, including work on systems approaches in public health that examines how system dynamics models can be structured to inform responses to complex problems like obesity, rather than merely map their causes. She has also co-authored research that uses systems dynamics models calibrated with local data to explore how community leaders perceive and utilise such models in addressing childhood obesity, demonstrating how systems tools can bridge empirical understanding and community engagement.

In addition to applied systems work, Loes has contributed to methodological advances in computational modelling of complex health systems. This includes work on refining causal loop diagrams into forms amenable to quantitative simulation, helping to translate conceptual systems thinking into executable models, and engaging critically with how network analysis should be used — or avoided — in identifying leverage points within causal structures. Her publications span high-impact journals and demonstrate a sustained commitment to rigorous, systems-informed public health science.

For a team engaged in Complex Systems and Policy, Loes brings a unique combination of theoretical sophistication, computational expertise, and public health relevance. Her work exemplifies how complexity science can be operationalised through computational modelling to deepen our understanding of dynamic social and health systems, and to support policy interventions that account for feedback, non-linearity, and adaptation.

Drs. Lieke Mulder is a lecturer and educational developer at the Institute for Interdisciplinary Studies (IIS) at the University of Amsterdam, where she plays a central role in shaping and delivering the Complex Systems and Policy master’s programme. She is recognised for her expertise in designing and teaching interdisciplinary, challenge-based curriculum that helps students navigate the dynamic terrain between theory, quantitative analysis, and policy insight. In her role at IIS, Lieke supervises the first cohort of Complex Systems and Policy, guiding students as they learn to think critically about complex societal issues and translate systems thinking into effective practice across domains such as food systems, sustainability, and governance.

Lieke has a strong background in interdisciplinary education and systems thinking pedagogy. She specialises in courses that challenge students to integrate diverse disciplinary perspectives and methods, such as systemic change, reflexive design, and scenario planning — all designed to help learners move beyond traditional disciplinary boundaries and engage deeply with real-world complexity. Her teaching emphasises both theoretical depth and practical engagement, encouraging students to develop insights into how systems operate and how policy decisions emerge from, and influence, those systems. As part of her curriculum work, she has facilitated cross-disciplinary collaboration among teaching staff and promoted innovative approaches to embedding sustainability and systems thinking in higher education.

Within the Complex Systems and Policy programme, Lieke not only teaches but also contributes to the intellectual culture of the cohort, helping students build quantitative modelling skills while simultaneously reflecting on policy processes and decision making. She emphasises learning by doing, where students confront real policy problems and learn to articulate and navigate the assumptions and values they bring from their own disciplinary backgrounds. Through this blend of rigour, reflection, and application, Lieke supports students in becoming nuanced thinkers who can bridge analysis and policy in complex systems contexts.

For a team of lecturers engaged in complexity and policy education, Lieke Mulder brings a deep commitment to interdisciplinary pedagogy, a track record of fostering transformative learning experiences, and a strong belief in integrating systems thinking with practical policy understanding — making her an invaluable contributor to the programme’s mission and academic community.

Drs. Arja O. Rydin is a lecturer at the Institute for Interdisciplinary Studies and closely connected with Amsterdam UMC and the Department of Psychiatry. She is currently pursuing her PhD, where her work bridges computational science, psychiatry, and public health through innovative applications of network analysis and systems methods to complex biomedical and psychological phenomena. Arja’s background reflects a strong interdisciplinary foundation: she studied liberal arts and sciences with a major in mathematics and applied this quantitative grounding to investigate multifaceted health problems that are shaped by interacting biological, behavioural, and environmental factors.

A central theme in Arja’s research is the use of network-based modelling to unpack complexity in human health, particularly in the context of mental health and cardiometabolic disorders. Her publications in high-impact outlets demonstrate this focus. In a 2023 paper in Psychological Medicine, she applied mixed graphical models to examine how individual depressive symptoms relate to a broad panel of metabolic biomarkers, showing that specific symptom–metabolite associations can reveal deeper structures in comorbidity dynamics that would be obscured by traditional linear analyses. In 2025 she co-authored work in European Heart Journal Open and Biological Psychiatry Global Open Science that further explored immunometabolic pathways and multimodal network approaches to link early cardiovascular risk and depression, illustrating how computational and network techniques can illuminate cross-domain mechanisms underlying complex disease interactions.

Arja’s work embodies a systems perspective in which health outcomes are not viewed as isolated endpoints, but as emergent properties of interacting biological and behavioural subsystems. Her research integrates machine learning, longitudinal data analysis, multilayer network modelling, and computational science, which equips her to tackle questions about how heterogeneous symptom profiles, metabolic processes, and risk factors co-evolve over time. This focus on non-linear, high-dimensional interdependencies resonates strongly with the intellectual foundations of complex systems science.

For a team working on Complex Systems and Policy, Arja brings an example of how computational systems approaches can be applied beyond traditional policy domains to understand complex health dynamics. Her work highlights the value of network methods for capturing feedback, heterogeneity, and structural coupling across multiple layers of biological and behavioural systems. This perspective enriches discussions of complexity by showing how quantitative systems tools can uncover deep patterns in high-dimensional data and inform interventions where human health, social behaviour, and systemic risk intersect.