Verena Seufert

Verena Seufert is an Assistant Professor in Land Use and Food System Dynamics in the Environmental Geography group at the Institute for Environmental Studies (IVM). She is an interdisciplinary environmental scientist specializing in agriculture and food topics.

Verena’s research focuses on the question of how to do food better: How can we create a world where everyone has access to sufficient and nutritious food they enjoy eating, while producing this food without destroying the very natural resources that food production depends on? There are many purported answers to the question of how to do food better, from local food, over a vegan diet to organic agriculture. But what do we actually know about these supposed solutions? Debates around these issues are often very passionate, but typically not sufficiently informed by good science. A particular focus of Verena’s work has been to assess the debates around one of these potential solutions – organic agriculture – using a variety of different interdisciplinary scientific tools.

Verena teaches and coordinates courses on spatial analysis, global environmental change and metropole ecology in the Environment and Resource Management (ERM) and Earth Sciences Master programmes.

Verena received her PhD degree from the Department of Geography at McGill University, Canada. After having done a Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Institute for Resources, Environment and Sustainability (IRES) at the University of British Columbia (UBC), Canada she joined the Land Use Change & Climate Research Group at the Institute of Meteorology and Climate Research – Atmospheric Environmental Research (IMK-IFU) of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Germany as a PostDoc. She now holds a position as an Assistant Professor at IVM at Vrije Universiteit (VU) Amsterdam.

Expertise

Food systems, Land use, Agricultural management, Meta-analysis.

2016: PhD in Geography, McGill University, Montreal, Canada

2009: Diploma in Biology, Julius Maximilian University of Würzburg, Germany

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