Research community

Supervisor
Katharina Schmid

Bio
After finishing her Master's at the American University of Beirut, Aya did her PhD in social and political psychology at the Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods in Bonn, Germany. Her research generally centers social justice and change, with a focus on intergroup relations and collective action. Her doctoral work specially investigated the dynamics of solidarity and state repression.

She is currently a postdoctoral researcher at Esade, working with professor Katharina Schmid at the Leadership Development Research Centre (GLEAD). She will continue to explore protest behaviour in various settings, and integrate contextual and individual-level influences on it.

Supervisor
Anna Ginés

Bio
Matteo obtained his PhD in Labour Law at the University of Milan in 2019. And his research in the field of evolution of workers' organizations in the digital age got an international recognition in 2018, with the Marco Biagi Award, granted by the International Association of Labour Law Journals.

He is currently a postdoctoral researcher in the Horizon2020 project Equal4Europe, which aims to develop and implement Gender Equality Standards for AHMSSBL (Art, Humanities, Medicine, Social Sciences, Business & Management and Law) research institutions throughout Europe. This project aims to promote equal economic independence for women and men, also through solutions contrasting the gender pay gap and advancing gender balance in decision-making. He is also conducting studies about the implications of the Covid-19 pandemic on labour relationships, with specific reference to working time issues relating to telework.

Supervisor
Lisa Hehenberger

Bio
Suwen studies her PhD at the University of Edinburgh Business School, and she holds an MBA from the University of Edinburgh and a Master’s Degree in Translation Technology from Imperial College London. She has been advising business angels, social enterprises, investment firms and charities on sustainability strategies and impact measurement.

She is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Esade Entrepreneurship Institute, working on impact investing and social entrepreneurship. Her research looks at impact investing from various perspectives, including practices and performance in impact management, gender dynamics in the field, and impact investment decision-making. She has investigated extensively impact investing and business angels in the UK, especially Scotland.

Supervisor
Katharina Schmid

Bio
Jonas holds a BA, MSc, and PhD in psychology from Ghent University. He is a Postdoctoral researcher in the department of People Management and Organization. His research focuses on reasoning and decision-making. He has fairly broad research interests that can be organized under two research programs.

He investigates how cognitive abilities and styles impact (a) political and intergroup attitudes, and (b) judgments of truth and attitude adjustment.

Supervisor
Tobias Hahn /Maja Tampe

Bio
Veronica is a sociologist, with an MSc in Social Research and Development, and a PhD in Environmental Sciences and Technologies (University of Barcelona). After doing her PhD, she began her career as an academic, at the Adolfo Ibañez University Business School in Chile. She taught non-market strategies and started her research on B Corporations and regenerative businesses. She also became Director of the Sustainable Management minor within the School’s MSc Management and Strategy, and commenced teaching on the subject of sustainable business models.

She also did a one-year academic visit at the ICTA (Environmental Sciences and Technologies Institute), UAB, to explore the potential synergies between regenerative business and postgrowth. Additionally, she became a member of the Board of B Academics, a global network which promotes teaching and research on B Corporations. She is currently co-leading the SEKN's research project on regenerative business. At present, Veronica is a postdoc researcher at ESADE, collaborating in a research project on regenerative agriculture in Spain.

Supervisor
Maria José Parada

Bio
Lina is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow with Esade Entrepreneurship institute. She joined Esade in September 2016 and finished her PhD on March 2021. Her research focused on Informal institutions and their influence on the family and family business. During her PhD, her research won two Best Paper awards, and at EIASM, Cyprus, workshop on Family Firm Management in 2018 and Academy of Management Conference, Boston, from the Entrepreneurship Division in 2019.

She is currently working on two papers under her broader research interest (Informal institutions and their influence on the family and family business), undergoing 2nd and 3rd stage reviews in top journals and she hopes that both will get accepted for publication latest first quarter of 2022.

Supervisor
Mario Lara

Bio
Paula’s research primarily focuses on business groups and their corporate governance. Namely, the composition of boards of directors, ownership structures, and gender issues. She is specialized in quantitative methods but regularly conducts qualitative analysis, this last with a focus on practitioner-related research. Her work has been published in top-tier journals and presented in leading conferences.

She is currently a Postdoctoral research fellow at the Center for Corporate Governance at Esade Business School since October 2020. Before joining Esade, she received her Ph.D. from Universitat de les Illes Balears, where she taught Human Resources and Family Business courses. During spring 2018, she was visiting Northeastern University.

Supervisor
Jordi Vinaixa

Bio
Hasan has a multinational background with an academic career spanning multiple disciplines. He is completing a PhD in Clean Energy and Climate Change at the University of Edinburgh Business School, where his thesis revolves around building business models for breakthrough low-carbon technologies in steelmaking in order to bring ‘green steel’ products to the market. He also holds an MSc in Carbon Finance and an MSc in Oceanography on the back of a BSc in Biology with focus on marine sciences. In recent years, his research focused on building financial cases for low-carbon and renewable energy projects, in particular wave energy, offshore wind energy, and CCS technologies in the UK and China.

Most recently, he has taken on a postdoctoral research fellow position at Esade Business, assisting the delivery of an EU-funded Horizon2020 project, EU-SysFlex, which, in partnership with a number of high-profile energy stakeholders in Europe, investigates business models that help tackle the technical challenges created by the increasing share of renewables in the European energy mix.

Supervisor
Nuria Agell

Bio
Jennifer is a postdoc at the Institute for Data Driven Decisions. She collaborates with Dr. Núria Agell and Dr. Angel Saz from the JUICE and EsadeGeo research groups. Her research explores geopolitical actors, their relationships and perceptions using world news, and ranking items based on customer reviews.

To accomplish this, in those groups she is working on methods to analyze and synthesize text sentiment to facilitate the comparison among groups for both use cases. In the future, they hope to expand on these models and improve their interpretability.

Supervisor
Jonathan Wareham

Bio
Angelo finished his Ph.D. at VU University Amsterdam, exploring the commercialization and adoption of early-stage technologies in the pharmaceutical industry. He has collaborated with large scientific infrastructures, big pharma companies, biotech spin-offs and academic drug discovery groups. He is also involved in Embiggen Consulting, an emerging consulting firm building innovation capacity in emerging markets.

He is a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute for Innovation and Knowledge Management, and his research focuses on deep tech, digital infrastructures and life science innovations. Currently, he is involved in two large European projects coordinated by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN). The first is ATTRACT, an initiative aiming to accelerate the commercialization of technologies from the continent's largest research infrastructures. The second is the Science Mesh which aims to boost interdisciplinary research collaborations by connecting the different cloud services across Europe.

Supervisor
Jordi Nin

Bio
Nahuel holds a degree in Mathematics and a Master's degree in Astrophysics, Particle Physics and Gravitation, Theoretical and Mathematical Physics, both at Barcelona University (UB). He also obtained his PhD at UB and now he is currently a postdoctoral researcher at Esade, working at the Institute for Data-Driven Decisions.

Supervisor
Bilgehan Uzunca

Bio
Alessandro earned a PhD from Bayes Business School, University of London. His research lies at the intersection between business and society. As such, he looks at new forms of organizing, namely non-standard or precarious work and platforms. His PhD thesis looked at internships in Brussels, in and around the European Union, and at employment relationship in the gig economy. In his current position, he is studying the impact of platforms on the society at large with a focus on delivery apps.

Overall, his work aims at pushing the boundaries of corporate social responsibility so to capture what is the impact of radical new technologies on organizations and Western societies. This is reflected in his teaching experience, covering critical thinking, sociology for business, and sustainability.

Supervisor
Petya Platikanova

Bio
Damian obtained his PhD from the University of Barcelona, and he was previously a postdoctoral researcher at the University Rovira i Virgili. His main field of research is the economics of innovation with a particular interest in knowledge transfer and regional economics.

Furthermore, his research focuses on how companies can benefit from external sources of knowledge, and specifically through networking activities (collaboration and/or offshoring-outsourcing); trying to understand how the knowledge environment in their regions/sectors affects this process. Currently, he works on several research projects related to innovation, sustainability and financial performance. He is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Economics, Finance and Accounting (GREF).

Supervisor
Annachiara Longoni

Bio

Jordi is a postdoc at Esade and an associate researcher at the Institute for Business Ethics at the University of St Gallen. Combining normative and empirical approaches, Jordi’s research focuses on how organizations deal with their irresponsibilities; more specifically, he enjoys tackling the question of how they (should) repair for the wrongs they may have inflicted on stakeholders. He does so mainly through the lenses of business and human rights literature.

Jordi is currently working on the construction of a dataset of public allegations of human rights abuse with the intention to test whether and how the publication of these allegations may lead to adjustments in their internal supply chain policies. Also, he plans to continue making progress on several projects related to transitional justice and corporate remedy building on his previous field research in Colombia and South Africa.

Supervisor
Angel Saz

Bio
Ana Aguilera holds a Master's degree in Geopolitics and Strategic Studies from Universidad Carlos III de Madrid and a degree in International Relations from Universidad Rey Juan Carlos. During the period 2021-2022, Ana led the project "Drug trafficking and jihadism in sub-Saharan Africa", funded by the Secretary of State for Foreign and Global Affairs of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, European Union and Cooperation.

Ana has been a research assistant at the EsadeGeo Center for Global Economy and Geopolitics since April 2022. Currently, Ana is involved in the European project ENGAGE, funded by the Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme of the European Union (EU) that aims to examine how the EU can effectively and sustainably meet strategic challenges by harnessing all of its tools to become a more assertive global actor.

Supervisor
Jonathan Wareham

Bio
Gozal holds a Bachelor of Arts in Business- Tourism and Leisure Management- from the IMC Fachhochschule Krems University (Austria). She graduated with a Master's in Neuromanagement from King Juan Carlos University. Moreover, she completed her studies with a Master's in Business and Economics from the University of Granada.

Her research work is focused on the evolving relationships between deep tech, innovation, and business. Gozal was involved in two large European projects coordinated by CERN. The first project is ATTRACT, which aims to develop commercially viable proofs-of-concept based on the very sophisticated instrumentation, detection, and computational technologies developed for Europe’s leading scientific research infrastructures. The second is Science Mesh, which aims to create a federated mesh infrastructure, to enable researchers to easily access and leverage data across different cloud storage providers.

Supervisor
Matteo Prato

Bio
Akhtar holds a Bachelor in Technology, Mechanical and Industrial Engineering from Maharshi Dayanand University (India). He graduated with a Master's degree in Economics from the Barcelona School of Economics. Furthermore, he is a Marine Engineer with a demonstrated history of working in the maritime industry, and experience in Quantitative Analytics, Machine Learning and Data Science.

He has been working on the project BLINDSPOT - Diversity and Performance: Networks of Cognition in Markets and Teams, which investigated cognitive challenges with the aim of developing a comprehensive sociological approach to studying the social properties of cognition. And he is currently working on a new project at the Entrepreneurship Institute that will address this main research question: Is the rewarding of exceptional performance coloured by gender?

Supervisor
Ivanka Visnjic

Bio
Jeff completed his Bachelor’s degree at the Management Center Innsbruck with two theses: "Blockchain Technology in European Financial Institutions", and "Pharmaceutical Patents & Innovation". Furthermore, his master thesis titled "The Implementation of Big Data Analytics: Barriers and Solutions for Industrial SMEs in the EU" was accepted in 2019 at Universitat Pompeu Fabra - Barcelona School of Management. He is interested in studying collaborations and innovative relationships between government, startups, and industry.

He is currently working as a Research Assistant under Dr Ivanka Visnjic supporting her research in business model innovation and servitization. And he also serves as a grant writer and research promoter, and creates managerial & educational content based on research output within Institute for Innovation and Knowledge Management.

Supervisor
Carlo Sala

Bio
Edoardo graduated in 2021 from the University of Milan, with an MSc in Quantitative Finance. His final essay introduced a new method to compute the price of a spread option by means of a copula function. And this work was also presented at the 2021 European Conference of Operational Research.

During his professional career, he worked in the Credit Analytics team at UniCredit in Munich, and for the Quantitative Risk and Stress Testing department of Citibank in Warsaw. His research interests include, but are not limited to, Derivative Pricing, Mathematical Finance, Data Science and Financial Engineering. He is currently working alongside Professor Carlo Sala as a Research assistant, focusing mainly on topics in Risk Management, Option Pricing and Econometrics.

Supervisor
Luca Del Viva

Bio
Ivan holds a degree in Technical Engineering in Computer Systems from the Technical University of Catalonia and a Master's degree in Data Science, Data Processing and Data Processing Technology from the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya. He has worked as a Research Assistant helping in the data acquisition and processing for the project entitled "Environmental impact of companies, profitability and stock collapse".

Supervisor
Angel Saz

Bio

Patrizia holds a dual degree in Law and Global Governance from Esade, and a master’s in International Relations, Security and Development from the Autonomous University of Barcelona, with exchange programmes in Jerusalem and New Delhi. 

She has worked at the EsadeGeo-Center for Global Economy and Geopolitics (in the team of Dr Javier Solana), the European Institute of the Mediterranean, and the Spanish Ministry of Foreign Affairs. She was also the Lead Co-Founder and President of the European Guanxi network. She has contributed to South China Morning Post, The Diplomat, and China Observers in Central and Eastern Europe, among others.

Supervisor
Eugenia Bieto

Bio
Anaclara holds a Bachelor of Arts in International Business from the Catholic University of Uruguay (Montevideo), and completed her studies with a Master in International Affairs from the Blanquerna University (Barcelona).

Her research work is focused on the analysis and promotion of gender equality in educational and research settings. Currently, Anaclara is involved in the Esade Case Collection, coordinated by EQUAL4EUROPE and supervised by Prof. Eugenia Bieto. The overall goal of this initiative is to encourage and incentivize professors to use case studies with women protagonists. To do so, the Case Collection aims to provide professors with a starting point for the use of business cases with women protagonists, which also serves as a guide for them to write other cases, to support and promote the creation of high-quality teaching business cases that accurately represent real women in leadership roles in the workplace.

Supervisor
Angel Saz

Bio
David Lane is a Research Assistant at the EsadeGeo Center for Global Economy and Geopolitics since September 2021. He holds a degree in Combined Honours in Social Sciences from Durham University (UK) and a Master's degree in International Relations from the Institut Barcelona d'Estudis Internacionals (IBEI).

At EsadeGeo, he works as a speechwriter and research assistant to President Javier Solana. He also collaborates in the organization of the MBA courses Global Governance in the 21st Century and Business, Government and Society. In addition, he has done research in international Law, specifically on the Law of neutrality in the context of the war in Ukraine.

Supervisor
Angel Saz

Bio
Carlota Moreno is a research and project management assistant at the EsadeGeo Center for Global Economy and Geopolitics. She is a Politics, Psychology, Law and Economics (PPLE) graduate from the University of Amsterdam, where she also obtained an MSc in International Relations. Her research interests include the geopolitics of energy, climate change and technology, and global economic governance.

Currently, she is involved in two H2020 projects. The first project, ENGAGE, aims to provide policymakers with recommendations for improving the capacities and capabilities of the EU’s external action. The GLOBE project, on the other hand, addresses the issues defined as strategic priorities in the 2016 EU Global Strategy.

Supervisor
Luca Del Viva

Bio
Claudio holds a Bachelor’s degree in Engineering Science in Industrial Engineering at the University of Chile. He graduated with a Master's degree in Applied Economics at the same university and another Master in Theoretical and Applied Linguistics at Pompeu Fabra University.

He has worked for more than six years using mainly Stata and MATLAB for the analysis of large databases, and simulation and prediction of economic behaviour. Currently, he is involved in different projects, doing analysis of text corpus, pitch analysis, and natural language processing, working mainly in Python. He also developed a projection model for the unemployment funds for the Chilean system. This predictive model is based on historical individual behaviour from labour market, using a large administrative data set. This model is currently used for the evaluation of public policies.

Supervisor
Anna Ginés

Bio
Juan is working on the project #LABORALgorithm at Esade's Institute for Labor Studies, led by Professor Anna Ginès i Fabrellas. This project aims to study the use of algorithms in employment relationships, as well as the use of algorithms for automated decision-making and profiling in labour matters.

In regard to the project, he analyzes the rights of information, consultation and negotiation of the legal representation from the workforce regarding the use of algorithms and artificial intelligence systems in the employment relationship.

Supervisor
Angel Saz

Bio
Darío Quadri Ilkhani is a research assistant at the EsadeGeo Center for Global Economy and Geopolitics. He previously worked in policy and advocacy at a think-tank in the UK and at CIDOB in Barcelona as an intern. He holds a Master in International Security from the Institut Barcelona d’Estudis Internacionals, with a semester abroad at the American University in Cairo.

The bulk of his work during the 2021-22 academic year involved managing the EU Energy Transition projects in collaboration with the Repsol Foundation, which mainly comprised in the planification and development of six webinars analyzing the energy transition progress in Europe. He also assisted in the organization of EsadeGeo’s 10th Annual Energy Meeting, titled “Fit for 55: Accelerating the Energy Transition and the Re-industrialization of Europe”, hosted together with the Representative Office of the European Commission in Madrid and EIT InnoEnergy.

Supervisor
Marc Esteve

Bio
Martin has experience as a public manager, being responsible for project management and implementation as well as strategic decision-making ranging from public-tender design to institutional communication. He also has over five years of market research and consulting experience. He is motivated by problem-solving particularly when they require diving, along with interdisciplinary teams, into previously unexplored areas in order to achieve sustainable solutions. He has a Bachelor's degree in Political Science from Universidad de Buenos Aires and a Masters's degree in Management and Public Administration from the University College of London (UCL).

After his research period initiated during his master's, he joined EsadeGov to deepen his research on Public Management. He has participated in projects covering determinants of the overall cost in public service provision within different organizational designs, determinants and mediating factors for the emergence of Private-Public-Collaborations, as well as, more management and organizational behaviour scope determinants of public sector employee motivation.

Supervisor
Dimo Ringov

Bio
Oscar Smallenbroek received a PhD in Political and Social Sciences from the European University Institute, Florence Italy and studied psychology during his bachelor studies at Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada. His main interests are personal values and their relationship to occupational stratification and gender. He is currently a policy analyst at the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission in Ispra, Italy where he develops composite indicators, including a project that tracks the innovation performance of European Union member states. During his time at Esade, Oscar Smallenbroek was working as a research assistant for Professor Dimo Ringov and Yan Bai. He was involved with the preparation of Burning Glass data to explore the job growth dynamics of start-ups using machine learning models.

Supervisor
Ivanka Visnjic

Bio
Georgina has graduated from BPP University with a Legal Practice Course and a Master of Laws (LPC LLM), having previously undertaken a Bachelor of Laws in King’s College London. Georgina focused her Master of Laws on how patent law could be reformed to accommodate Artificial Intelligence.

She was working with Dr. Ivanka Visnjic in the Institute for Innovation and Knowledge Management. Their research focused on digital transformations, servitization of businesses, and business model transformations in an innovation context.

Supervisor
Angel Saz

Bio
Mateu Tomi Marin is a research assistant at the EsadeGeo Center for Global Economy and Geopolitics. He holds a Bachelor's degree in Political and Administration Sciences from Universitat Pompeu Fabra (Barcelona). He graduated with a Master's in International Relations from Leiden University (Netherlands), and completed his studies with a postgraduate course on data analysis from the Col·legi de Politòlegs de Catalunya.

His research interests include the EU's external action and North Korea, particularly the issue of denuclearisation and inter-Korean relations. Currently, Mateu is involved in the Horizon 2020 ENGAGE project, which examines how the EU can effectively and sustainably meet strategic challenges by harnessing all of its tools to become a more assertive global actor.

Supervisor
Jordi Vinaixa

Bio
Winnie is graduated in Management and Bio-Engineering in 2012 from the Catholic University of Leuven (Belgium). She worked for more than five years as a Project Manager for industrial projects, designing chocolate factories, amongst others.

She is currently a Research Assistant at Esade, focusing on innovative business models for different solutions around renewable energy and electricity grid problems. In that context, she works together with professor Jordi Vinaixa and postdoctoral researcher Hasan Muslemani on a European Horizon2020 project, EU-SysFlex, working with different European partners on the business models and exploitation of five selected project results.

Supervisor
Annachiara Longoni, David Murillo

Bio
Mireia holds a PhD in sociology (UB). She has worked as Associate Lecturer in the Department of Sociology at the University of Barcelona at the same time that she was a freelance research consultant. Nowadays she is a researcher associated to both the Business Network Dynamics (BuNeD) research group and also to the Institute for Social Innovation (ISS). She is also teaching Sociology in the BBA at Esade as an academic collaborator.

She has extensive experience as a researcher in various projects both at a European and national level. And is currently involved in two research projects: “Supporting compliance and better OSH practice through leverage in market-based initiatives (Lift-OSH)” lead by Annachiara Longoni as well as the project about Food Waste, Food Banks and digitalization lead by David Murillo.