Individual PhD supervisions
I am regularly involved in supervision of PhD students, financed by University's internal scholarships, graduate programmes and external bodies such as research institutions, corporations and foundations (e.g. Heinrich-Böll, Friedrich-Ebert and Rosa-Luxembourg Foundations). I am interested in supervising doctoral theses that critically engage with sustainability practices of food business & entrepreneurs and focus on issues of social ir/responsibility, accountability and sustainability management and reporting in the food sector. Likewise, new ways of organising food production and transforming agrifood production networks provide interesting angles for doctoral theses.
PhD platform on "Food Business and Technology"
"Sustainability along food chains" was the main theme of a cooperative PhD platform on Food Business and Technology which I was the spokesperson of during my time as Professor and Vice Dean (Research) at the University of Kassel. Thanks to the generous funding by the Hessian Ministry of Higher Education, Research, Science and the Arts, we were able to offer sholarships to PhD students supervised in tandems by colleagues of the University of Kassel and the Fulda University of Applied Sciences. We covered an exciting spectrum of topics ranging from sustainable food packaging via persistencies and transformation of food systems to strategic framing of genome editing.
Sustainable Agricultural and Food Systems (SAFS) Structured Doctoral Programme
The "Sustainable Agricultural and Food Systems" (SAFS) Structured Doctoral Programme was a long-term structured graduate programme in order to connect graduates from different disciplines to deepen and integrate learning and research about real-world, complex issues in agricultural and food system. The doctoral programme was financed by Volkswagen Foundation and Rustaveli Foundation in Georgia and jointly offered by the Faculty of Organic Agricultural Sciences, University of Kassel, Germany and the School of Agricultural and Natural Sciences of the Agricultural University of Georgia. In my role as SAFS's Co-Director for the University of Kassel, I was also involved in PhD supervision.
Graduate Centre for Environmental Research and Teaching (GradZ)
For many years, I was the Spokesperson of the Graduate Centre for Environmental Research and Teaching (GradZ) at the University of Kassel. As part of a certificate programme on environmental knowledge, we organised workshops, field trips and seminars on sustainability and empirical methods to research students interested in interdisciplinary research on environmental and sustainability issues.