Mariëlle Rietkerk

Bio
Mariëlle Rietkerk is a PhD candidate at the faculty of Technology, Policy and Management working on the energy transition, bridging the gap between behavioural science and system modelling. She works at the Multi Actor Systems department and is a member of the Energy Transition Lab. It is her belief that integrating behavioural insights and methodology into agent-based models will contribute to speeding up the energy transition.
Mariëlle holds a bachelor’s degree in Environmental Chemistry from University of Applied Sciences Leiden (2000) and a master’s degree in Economic and Consumer Psychology from Leiden University (2015). She worked as a social scientist at TNO and Milieu Centraal before she joined TU Delft in 2023.

Research
The energy transition requires behavioural and social change on a multi-actor level. Understanding behavioural change and their precursors in such complex multi-actor systems is challenging: the actors’ underlying psychological processes (e.g. group dynamics, preferences, expectations, habits) vary widely and are difficult to identify. At the same time, most existing agent-based energy transition models lack detail and profound scientific background when considering behavioural and social structures in the energy system.
In her PhD research, Mariëlle aims to translate psychological theories into re-usable building blocks for implementation in models, and pursues the integration of behavioural and modelling research methods to improve data quality.

Hobbies
Mariëlle likes to dance salsa (with whoever wants to lead) and Argentinian tango (with her better half), reads comics (strongly advises ‘Y, The Last Man’), loves the occasional day of vanishing in Murakami (any book of his writing), wants to learn golf surfing (for a while now…) and is lobbying for a dog.