UNU-MERIT Faculty Members

All coursework and supervision will be directed by scholars from UNU-MERIT and associated faculty members from institutions linked with UNU-MERIT. The faculty members are drawn from diverse academic and professional fields and have achieved international recognition for their expertise.

Dr. Anthony Bartzokas
Dr. Anthony Bartzokas is Professorial Fellow at UNU-MERIT and on the faculty of the Department of Economics, University of Athens, Greece.  He is an economist by training with a PhD in the Economics of Technological Change. His work in recent years has focused on trajectories of technological change, with special reference to the role of financial markets, industrial organization and environmental regulation in Developed and Industrializing Countries. He has carried out extensive research on the impact of innovation and technology policy in industrialization and economic development with financial support from several international organizations and the European Union.

Professor Wiebe E. Bijker
Wiebe E. Bijker is professor of Technology & Society at the University of Maastricht. He was trained as an engineer in applied physics (Technical University of Delft), studied philosophy (University of Groningen), and holds a PhD in the sociology and history of technology (University of Twente). Bijker is Director of Studies of the research master MPhil-degree programme Cultures of Arts, Science, and Technology (CAST). He is founding co-editor of the monograph series Inside Technology of MIT Press. Bijker’s research focuses on the relation between technology, society, and science. Since the 1990’s political and normative issues have been central. These are being studied in a variety of empirical domains: ICT, gender and technology, public health policies, science & technology for developing nations, public participation experiments, architecture and planning. His most recent work relates to issues of vulnerability in a technological culture.

Dr. Ionara Costa
Ionara Costa, a Brazilian national, joined UNU-MERIT in December 2004. She was previously Executive Coordinator of a multisectoral research initiative in Brazil , the Observatory of Strategies for Innovation (OEI), and a lecturer in Economics at the Catholic University of Campinas, Sao Paulo , Brazil. Her research specialization is the role of TNC affiliates in local technological learning, and the methodological aspects of technological indicators, particularly innovation surveys. Dr. Costa is developing a UNU-INTECH research project on the strategies that TNCs adopt towards their affiliates in developing countries, in terms of innovative and technological activities. The study will identify policies that host governments can put in place to encourage TNCs to play a more active role in building local technological capabilities. Dr. Costa obtained a PhD in Science and Technology Policy from the State University of Campinas (DPCT/UNICAMP), Brazil .

Professor dr Robin Cowan
Robin Cowan is Professor of the Economics of Technical Change at the University of Maastricht . He began his official affiliation with UNU-MERIT in 1996 as a Professorial Fellow. He studied at Queen's University in Canada and at Stanford University where he received a PhD in economics and an MA in philosophy. Robin Cowan was Assistant Professor of Economics at the University of Western Ontario until 1998. His current research has includes several topics: the changing economics of knowledge; social networks and innovation; network structure and network performance; dynamics of consumption and social status; interacting agents models. In the past he has done consulting research for the OECD on the economics of standards, the European Commission on innovation policy, and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory on technological lock-in and renewable energy technologies. In 2004 he won one of 15 prestigious Chaires d'Excellence of the Ministry of research and Education in France . Robin Cowan is also an adjunct professor at the Economics Department at the University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada.

Professor dr Geert Duysters
Geert Duysters is an economist with a PhD in Economics and Business Administration. After working at the University of Maastricht as subsequently, researcher, assistant professor and associate professor he is currently employed as a Professorial  Fellow at UNU-MERIT. He is also a part-time full professor of Organization Science at the faculty of Technology Management of the Eindhoven University of Technology. His academic research mainly concerns international business strategies, innovation strategies, mergers and acquisitions, technology catch up strategies of developing countries, network analytical methods and strategic alliances. He has published over 50 international refereed articles and book chapters. His interest in business strategies and innovation strategies is not only academic, as he worked for several years as a consultant (senior manager) for KPMG Alliances at the international headquarters in Amstelveen (the Netherlands). He also acts as a founding global board member of the Association of Strategic Alliance Professionals (ASAP).

Dr  Paul Engel
Paul Engel is Director of the European Centre for Development Policy Management in Maastricht, the Netherlands. He is a Dutch national who worked in Peru, Ghana and Colombia, as an evaluation researcher, rural communication specialist and project manager, respectively. For his work he travelled extensively in Africa, Latin America and Europe. In the Netherlands, he directed the international extension programme of the Ministry of Agriculture and lectured at the Department of  Communication and Innovation Studies, Wageningen University. He directed research programmes on knowledge management in agriculture and developed a soft systems approach towards facilitating capacity building, innovation and learning for development. With his team, he developed and published a participatory action-research methodology to strengthen the innovative capacities of local and institutional actors and to design effective multi-stakeholder co-operation and communication strategies (RAAKS). Prior to joining ECDPM, he worked as an international consultant and taught management and organisation for rural (business) development at Concepción University, Chile, where he established and directed the Centre for Studies and Management of Sustainable Rural Development, CEDRO. During this period he studied the role and management of knowledge networks and agricultural chains in development and developed a particular interest in the relationship between evaluation, management and organisational learning.

Dr. Padmashree Gehl Sampath
Padmashree Gehl Sampath, an Indian National, joined UNU-MERIT in the autumn of 2002. She completed her doctoral studies at the Graduate College for Law and Economics, University of Hamburg, in 2002. Her research specialization is in biotechnology, with a particular emphasis on pharmaceuticals/health, and other issues relating to the global protection of intellectual property rights in developing countries. She actively participates in international discussions around the TRIPS Agreement and the Convention on Biological Diversity, on biotechnology-related issues. She also coordinates the UNU-MERIT Research Seminar Series . Dr. Gehl Sampath has consulted for the German Government and the European Commission on intellectual property rights and genetic resource usage and has published several articles and book chapters on these topics. She recently completed the book: Regulating Bioprospecting: Institutions for Drug Research, Access and Benefit-Sharing ( UNU Press, 2005). Prior to joining UNU-MERIT, Dr. Gehl Sampath worked as a research associate at the Institute for International and European Environmental Policy in Berlin.

Dr. Micheline Goedhuys
Micheline Goedhuys is a Lecturer at the Institute of Development Policy and Management of the University of Antwerp in Belgium . She has worked as a consultant to a number of international agencies and government programmes, including the International Labour Office (UN/ILO) Small Enterprise Development Unit, the World Bank, and the Belgian Administration of Development Cooperation. She has extensive research experience and project management experience in West and East Africa , in the area of industrial organization and employment creation through small enterprise development and entrepreneurship. She obtained a PhD in Economics from the University of Leuven, Belgium.

Professor dr John Hagedoorn
John Hagedoorn is Professor of Strategic Management at Maastricht University. He studied economic sociology and political economy at the University of Leiden and holds a Ph.D. in industrial economics from Maastricht University. He joined the Centre for Technology and Policy Studies (STB) of the Dutch research organisation TNO in April of 1978, where he became senior fellow in 1982. He was Visiting Research Fellow at the Science Policy Research Unit, University of Sussex, the Center for Economic Policy Research, Stanford University, the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley, the Center for International Science and Technology Policy, The George Washington University, and the University of Paris. Since 1985, he has been involved in work based on the diffusion of information technology and inter-firm technology agreements. He has been a consultant to the EU, the OECD and the Ministry of Economic Affairs. At UNU-MERIT he is in charge of the research programme technology and international competition.

Dr. Andy Hall
Dr. Hall joined UNU-MERIT in April 2004, as a researcher in the area of Innovation Processes and Policies in Agriculture. His research focus is on institutional learning and change processes in relation to sustainable development and the strengthening of local innovation systems. Dr. Hall was based at the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT) in India from 1997, on secondment from the Natural Resources Institute of the University of Greenwich, UK where he was a Reader in Innovation Systems. From 2001, Dr. Hall was regional coordinator for a research programme of the British agency for international cooperation, DFID, where he was instrumental in establishing a regional portfolio of partnership projects based on innovation system principles. Dr. Hall received his Ph.D. in Science and Technology Policy Studies from SPRU, University of Sussex in 1994 and holds an MSc in Rural Resource management. He has extensive research experience in India, Thailand, Bangladesh, Uganda, Tanzania, Kenya and South Africa and has published extensively in his area of specialization.

Professor Dr. Bronwyn Hall
Bronwyn H. Hall is Professor of Economics of Technology and Innovation at the Faculty of Economics and Business Administration of Maastricht University. She was Professor of Economics at the University of California at Berkeley from 1987 to 2005 and is now Professor in the Graduate School there. She is also a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research and the Institute for Fiscal Studies, London. She holds a B.A. in physics from Wellesley College and a Ph.D. in economics from Stanford University. Professor Hall has published articles on the economics and econometrics of technical change in journals such as Econometrica, the American Economic Review, the Rand Journal of Economics, and Research Policy. Her current research includes comparative analysis of the U.S. and European patent systems, the use of patent citation data for the valuation of intangible (knowledge) assets, comparative firm-level investment and innovation studies (the G-7 economies), measuring the returns to R&D and innovation at the firm level, analysis of technology policies such as R&D subsidies and tax incentives, and of recent changes in patenting behavior in the semiconductor and computer industries. She has also made substantial contributions to applied economic research via the creation of software for econometric estimation and of firm-level datasets for the study of innovation, including the widely used NBER dataset for U.S. patents. She is the founder and partner of TSP International, an econometric software firm.

Professor dr Friso den Hertog
Friso den Hertog is Professor of Technology, Organisational Design and Policy at the Faculty of Economics and Business Administration, University of Maastricht. He is also a senior consultant with the Koers Consultancy Bureau. Before joining Koers and UNU-MERIT in 1988, he was a research associate at Philips, and subsequently head of the social and medical sciences section of the Department of Science Policy of the Dutch Ministry of Education and Sciences. Friso den Hertog studied psychology at the University of Leiden, and obtained his Ph.D. from Delft Technical University in 1975. His research interests include the management of technology and the design of organisations to take advantage of new technologies and to improve the quality of life.

Dr René Kemp
René Kemp is a senior research fellow at UNU-MERIT and associate professor at the Faculty of Economics of Maastricht University, where he gives a course on technology and sustainable development. At UNU-MERIT, he is involved in policy research on the topic of environmental policy and technology and in research projects about the management of technological transitions to environmental sustainability, both as a researcher and project leader. In 1995 he obtained a Ph.D. in economics for his thesis on environmental policy and technical change. He has published extensively about innovation and environment issues in academic journals and wrote reports for the OECD, EU and the Dutch government. His research interests are: environmental policy and technical change, technological transitions, the management of technological regime shifts to environmental sustainability, green innovation policy, and evolutionary theories of technical change.

Dr. Kaushalesh Lal
Kaushalesh Lal, an Indian citizen, ,joined UNU-MERIT in May 2003. His area of specialization is the diffusion of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) in developing countries. He has published several research papers on the causes and consequences of the adoption of ICTs in small and medium enterprises (SMEs). Dr. Lal's research interests include the role of institutional, legal, and technological infrastructure in the transformation of business activities into e-business. He is also studying the problems and prospects of Open Source Software, particularly in developing countries. Before joining UNU-MERIT, Dr. Lal was Associate Professor at the Institute of Economic Growth, Delhi, India. He obtained his M.Sc. degree in Physics from Kanpur University, M.Sc. in Operations Research from University of Delhi and Ph.D. degree from Erasmus University Rotterdam, The Netherlands.

Dr. Boris Lokshin
Dr. Lokshin received his PhD in economics from University of Maastricht and MA in Economics from University of Indiana, Bloomington, USA . He did his undergraduate studies (receiving BA cum laude) at Kharkiv National University, Ukraine and St. Norbert College, Wisconsin, USA. His research interests include economics of innovation, firm productivity and economics of transition. He is born in Kharkiv , Ukraine (1975). Currently he is Assistant Professor at the Organization and Strategy department and researcher at Maastricht Economic and social Research centre on Innovation and Technology (MERIT).

Professor Dr Jacques Mairesse
Jacques. Mairesse' scholarly work has been mainly in the field of production economics and panel data econometrics, focusing on measurement of capital, productivity and technical change issues. He has been engaged in various comparative studies, using firm micro data for France and the U.S. or other countries, in particular to analyze research and development (R&D) activities and their effects on productivity. His main current topics of interest are in the economics of science, innovation and knowledge, with specific emphasis on performance evaluation at various levels of analysis (individual employee or scientist, firm or laboratory, industry), and on the interaction of technical change (in particular in information and communication technology- ICT) and organizational change.

Dr Huub Meijers
Huub Meijers finished his studies in general and quantitative economics at the University of Maastricht in August of 1989. In 1994, he obtained a Ph.D. from the same university. His Ph.D. thesis focuses on the measurement of technological change by integrating the ideas of diffusion of new technologies in a vintage framework. His main research interests are vintage modelling, the measurement and modelling of technological change and labour market issues. At present, he is involved in the construction of the multi-sector model MASTER, which focuses on the labour market in which several educational and occupational types are distinguished. In 1999 he joined the International Institute of Infonomics, where he is the programme leader of the e-society unit.

Professor Dr. Pierre Mohnen
Pierre Mohnen has a PhD in economics from New York University, and has been Professor in the Department of Economics at the University of Quebec in Montreal (UQAM) since 1984. He came to Maastricht as a Professorial Fellow in August, 2001. He was a Visiting Professor at the Universities of Paris I, Lyon II, and at the École Nationale de la Statistique et de l'Administration Économique. He is a frequent Visiting Researcher at CentER (Tilburg University), CREST (INSEE, Paris), and Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin. Pierre Mohnen is also a Fellow at CIRANO, the Center for Interuniversity Research and Analysis on Organizations. His research areas are the economics of production, applied econometrics, productivity and innovation.

Professor Banji Oyeyinka
Banji Oyelaran-Oyeyinka is a Senior Researcher and professor of Technology management and Industrialization at UNU-MERIT. He joined the Institute in March 2001 after working with the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) as senior economic affair officer coordinating the ten-yearly review of the Least Developed Countries (LDCs). Prior to that he was professor at the Nigerian Institute of Social and Economic Research (NISER), Ibadan , Nigeria. For several years he also served as National co-coordinator of the African Technology Policy Studies (ATPS) Network in Nigeria . Professor Oyeyinka obtained a DPhil. in Technology Policy and Industrialization from the Science Policy Research Unit (SPRU), University of Sussex . His current research focuses on comparative institutional analysis of systems of innovation in developing countries. He has done considerable work on information and communication technologies (ICTs) and small and medium enterprise (SME) and clusters, within the systems of innovation framework. He is a contributor to recent books including: (1) Putting the last First: The Making of African Innovation Systems", (Aaalborg Press, 2003); and (2) "Africadotedu: IT Opportunities and Higher Education in Africa ", (McGraw Hill, 2003).

Professor dr. Enrico Perotti
Enrico Perotti is Professor of International Finance at the University of Amsterdam and Professorial Fellow at UNU-MERIT. He is also Research Fellow at the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR) in London and at the Davidson Institute of the University of Michigan. He is a member of the Entrepreneurship Research Group at the NBER in Cambridge, Massachussets. His research focuses on corporate finance, financial development, international finance and entrepreneurial innovation. He has written on corporate governance, strategic capital structure choices, political economy of finance, formation of innovative firms, the theory of the firm, privatization, financial transition, strategic real options, carve outs, and crosslistings. He worked as a consultant for the World Bank since 1992, and has been a visting scholar at the IMF. In 1998 he established the Amsterdam Center for International Finance (CIFRA), which organizes several series of international conferences and workshops in International Finance and Corporate Finance across the world.

Mr Gerald Silverberg
Gerald Silverberg studied physics and mathematics at Cornell and Harvard Universities in the USA. He worked as a science journalist in New York before moving to Europe and studying economics and economic history as well as mathematical systems theory. He was a Research Associate at the University of Stuttgart from 1983 to 1987 with primary responsibility for a research project on technical change and the theory of self-organisation, sponsored by the German Research Council (DFG). In 1987, he was employed by the International Federation of Institutes for Advanced Study (IFIAS), and in 1995/6 was a Senior Research Scholar at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA). He has been a Senior Research Fellow at UNU-MERIT since January of 1988.

Professor dr Luc Soete
Luc Soete is Professor of International Economics at the Faculty of Economics and Business Administration, University of Maastricht. He completed his first degrees in economics and development economics at the University of Ghent, Belgium, before obtaining his Ph.D. in economics at the University of Sussex. Before coming to Maastricht in 1986, he worked at the Science Policy Research Unit (SPRU) at the University of Sussex and in the Department of Economics at Stanford University. In 1988 he set up UNU-MERIT, of which he has since been the director. In 1999 he became the director of a new interdisciplinary undertaking: the International Institute of Infonomics. The new institute currently groups some 70 researchers from different disciplines all focusing on various aspects of the digitisation of society. His research interests cover a wide range a theoretical and empirical studies of the impact of technological change on employment, economic growth and international trade and investment, as well as the related policy and measurement issues.

Professor dr Adam Szirmai
Adam Szirmai (Eddy)  is Professor of Technology and Development Studies at the Department of Technology Management, Eindhoven University of Technology. His research focuses on international comparisons of growth and productivity performance in manufacturing, with special reference to developing countries. He has been involved in research projects in manufacturing in Indonesia , China , South Korea , Tanzania , Zambia , South Africa and Japan . This research takes place in the context of the research programme of the Eindhoven Centre for Innovation Studies (ECIS) and the international comparisons of output and productivity project (ICOP) coordinated at the Groningen Growth and Development Centre. A second theme of his research concerns the relationships between innovation, technological change and (productivity) performance in sectors of manufacturing in developing countries. His research has a strong emphasis on empirical measurement of levels and trends in economic performance. Eddy Szirmai is engaged in an ongoing research project The Structure of World Manufacturing. This project focuses on long-run changes in the structure and location of manufacturing activities and the emergence of manufacturing in Developing Countries in the period 1950-2000.

Professor dr Bart Verspagen
Professor Verspagen is an economist specialized in the economics of technological change. He did his undergraduate studies at the University of Limburg (now called Maastricht University) in Maastricht, the Netherlands, from 1984 - 1988. After that, he obtained a PhD degree from the same university in 1992. During the five years after that,  he held a scholarship from the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW). His current workplace is the Eindhoven Centre for Innovation Studies (ECIS) at the Eindhoven University of Technology (TUE), where Dr Verspagen is a professor of economics of innovation and technological change.

Dr. Bas ter Weel
Bas ter Weel is a senior researcher at UNU-MERIT and a postdoctoral researcher in the department of economics at Maastricht University. His research focuses both on empirical and theoretical issues in the areas of labour economics and the economics of innovation and new technology. Most recently, he is also working on the role of interpersonal interactions between workers to explain labour-market outcomes, and the interplay between human evolution and economic outcomes (E&B Project). He is a research fellow at the Maastricht research school of economics of technology and organizations (METEOR), research fellow at the ESRC centre on skills, knowledge and organisational performance (SKOPE), University of Oxford, and research fellow at the Institute for the Study of Labor, (IZA), Bonn.

Dr. René Wintjes
René Wintjes is a senior research fellow at UNU-MERIT, which he joined in the beginning of 1998. He studied Economic Geography at Nijmegen University. He previously worked at the Economic Institute for Medium and Small Enterprises (EIM, Zoetermeer) and the Faculty of Applied Geography and Planning, Utrecht University. His PhD (September 2001) deals with the regional-economic impact and localization process of foreign companies in the Netherlands. Within the UNU-MERIT research group "Innovation Management in Firms and Regions" René Wintjes is mainly involved in research and consulting focused on regional innovation policy.

Dr Thomas Ziesemer
Thomas Ziesemer studied economics at the universities of Kiel (1974-75) and Regensburg (1975-78) in Germany. From 1982 to 1989 he was employed at the University of Regensburg, where he finished his doctoral dissertation on Economic Theory of Underdevelopment in 1985. He has been Assistant Professor of International Economics (since December of 1989), Associate Professor of Microeconomics (since October, 1994), and Associate Professor of Economics (since December 1996) at the Faculty of Economics and Business Administration of Maastricht University. In November 1996 he received his "Habilitation" from the Free University of Berlin. He is a fellow of METEOR and the International Institute of Infonomics.

Dr Adriaan van Zon
Adriaan van Zon has a Ph.D. in economics. Since 1988 he has been working at UNU-MERIT and the Faculty of Economics of Maastricht University. He has been involved in the construction of various empirical and theoretical macro-sectoral models in order to study the impact of technological change on employment and competitiveness, but also on CO2 emission reductions in a macro-sectoral framework