Project Team

Dr. Julika Weiß (project manager) is deputy head of the research field "Sustainable Energy and Climate Protection" and has been working as a researcher at the IÖW since 2006. She studied Environmental Engineering at the Technical University of Berlin and the Danmarks Tekniske Universitet and received her doctorate in Sustainable Consumption from the Humboldt University of Berlin. Her main areas of expertise are the energy efficiency of buildings, heat supply and ecological and economic evaluation. Dr. Julika Weiß has led numerous research and consulting projects in recent years, in particular on energy-efficient refurbishment and climate-friendly heat supply for buildings. The focus was on technological, ecological and economic issues, political framework conditions and the actors involved. In several projects, she dealt, among other things, with rebound effects in the energetic renovation of buildings.

Dr. Swantje Gährs (deputy project manager) studied mathematics with a minor in meteorology at the Freie Universität Berlin and received her doctorate at the Leibniz University of Hanover. Since 2013, she has worked in the field of sustainable energy management and climate protection at the IÖW. Her research focuses on energy-economics and technical modelling in detached and semi-detached houses and the role of prosumers in the energy system. In the EE-Rebound project, she contributes her experience in business models and markets for prosumers and her expertise in simulating energy consumption.

Prof. Dr. rer. soc. oec. Reinhard Madlener has held the Chair of Economics (esp. Energy Economics) at RWTH Aachen University since 2007. He studied commerce and business as well as pedagogics at the Vienna University of Economics and Business Administration (WU Wien) and then also economics at the Institute for Advanced Studies Vienna. Professor Madlener received his doctorate in economics from the Vienna University of Economics and specialised early in model-based analysis of energy and environmental issues (disciplinary and interdisciplinary research), later also in economic aspects of technology innovation and diffusion. Before joining RWTH Aachen University, Professor Madlener was senior assistant at the Centre for Energy Policy and Economics at ETH Zurich, lecturer at the University of Zurich and head of the Institute for Advanced Studies Carinthia. He established the Institute for Future Energy Consumer Needs and Behavior (FCN) at RWTH Aachen University. From 2010 to 2013 he was Director and from 2014 to 2016 Vice Director of JARA Energy and from 2008 to 2013 Research Professor at DIW Berlin. Mr. Madlener's areas of research are: Energy Economics and Policy-making, Economics of Technology Diffusion, Innovation Economics, Behavioural Economics, Ecological Economics, and Technology Management.

Hendrik Schmitz, M.Sc. studied economics at the University of Münster where he obtained the degrees of Bachelor of Science (B.Sc.) and Master of Science (M.Sc.). He joined FCN in March of 2014 as a research associate and doctoral student. Currently, his main research area is the rebound effect and its economic and political implications on a micro- and macroeconomic scale. In the EE-Rebound project, he contributes his experience in microeconometric modelling and conducts the quantitative survey.  

Ayse Tugba Atasoy, M. Sc. studied economics in Istanbul and Pisa, earning her bachelor’s degree from Yildiz Technical University. She then studied in the master’s program Economics and Institutions at the University of Marburg. During her studies she worked as an intern and student assistant in the department of Climate Policy at DIW Berlin and at the chair of Development Economics at the University of Marburg. She joined FCN in May 2014 as a research associate and doctoral student. Using experimental and empirical approaches, she studies questions in energy and behavioral economics, with a focus on energy efficiency standards, dynamic electricity pricing and tariff switching.

Dr. Elisabeth Dütschke studied psychology, business administration and marketing. For her PhD thesis she received an award from Südwest Metall as an outstanding contribution to research. Further work experience include consulting of private and public organizations and journalism as well as university lectures. Since June 2009 she has served at the Fraunhofer ISI / Karlsruhe as a senior scientist and project leader. Her work focuses on the human perspective on a changing energy system. She is the main contact for societal issues around the energy transition for the institute. In the project, she is primarily contributing to developing a theoretical concept, and supporting the preliminary study on communication on renewable energies, including conducting interviews.

Dr. Johannes Schuler studied Psychology at the University of Mannheim and the UCJC Madrid (Spain). Subsequently he specialized in Environmental Psychology at the Otto-von-Guericke University Magdeburg. From 2012 to 2016 he worked as research associate and international affairs coordinator in Psychology at the University of Mannheim with a focus on judgment and decision making, social cognition and quantitative methods. He conducted further research stays at Ohio-State University (OH, USA 2016) and at University Grenoble Alpes (France, 2017) and obtained his PhD in 2017 at the Department of Economic and Consumer Psychology. Later he worked as lecturer for Market and Advertising Psychology (FOM University) and consultant for survey design, statistics and market research. In 2018, he joined the Competence Center for Sustainability and Infrastructure Systems at Fraunhofer ISI as a research associate.

Julius Wesche studied economics at the Hamburg School of Business Administration. He is a research fellow at Fraunhofer ISI. In addition, he is doing his doctorate at the Copernicus Institute of the University of Utrecht on the coalition formation of niche actors in the course of sustainability transformations. His focus within the research project is on interviews with relevant actors.

Dr. Raymond Galvin is an affiliated researcher at FCN. He is also a tutor at Cambridge University and an evaluator for EU-funded research projects. His background is in engineering and social science. His doctoral studies were on policy issues in thermal upgrades of homes in Germany. He has published extensively on rebound effects, in homes, transport, ICT and the economic system as a whole. He uses both qualitative and quantitative methods in his empirical research. In the project he is conducting and analyzing interviews with prosumer households, and supporting the development and evaluation of a nation-wide household survey.