Junior Research Day
All junior researchers including PhD students, post-doc researchers and assistant professors, were invited to present one of their research projects to the other colleagues at the Department
The Department of Environmental and Business Economics held an IME-Researcher-Day 2016 on the 15th of November 2016.
The event was taking place in a very friendly and cozy atmosphere and its purpose was simply to inform the colleagues about the research that is being done by junior researchers at the Department.
As Yingkui Yang, Assistant professor at the IME, mentioned he did not want to bore the members of the faculty and wanted to use these 20 minutes of his presentation for making his colleagues understand why his research was important. Yingkui gave practical examples and little tasks to his colleagues during his presentation. For instance, he engaged the audience by asking about the standby devices in people’s homes aiming at the reflection of his colleagues on their own consumer behavior. Yingkui’s research is focusing on consumer behavior in the electricity market and he emphasizes the importance of the understanding of consumer behavior not only for the change towards renewable energy but also in order to use energy more efficiently.
Viktor Racz, PhD student at the IME, is working on similar issues as Yingkui, however, he is taking a different approach towards the problem of balancing supply of and demand for renewable energy. His work is dealing rather with tackling the problem from the supply side by focusing on the technology for electricity storage systems, than with altering consumer behavior. The main difficulty for the presentation at the department in his opinion was that it is really diverse, combining sociology, marketing and environmental economics groups. In a short presentation of 15 Minutes it was therefore impossible to go into great detail about his research and he tried not to overcomplicate his presentation. Nonetheless, he received useful feedback after the presentation and he regards the event as successful in regards to finding out what others are researching about. As Maarten Punt, Assistant professor at the IME, highlighted the event was particularly useful for increasing the knowledge exchange between the different research groups at the faculty. The research he presented at the Junior Researcher Day focuses on the effects of climate change induced spatial shifts of fish stock locations.
The organizer of the event Associated Professor Oliver Schnittka was satisfied with the presentations and the discussions as the purpose of the day is to allow the upcoming researchers to present and get feedback to their research in a friendly atmosphere.