Research

Because the energy transition relies on many disciplines to be successful, my latest research interest is to explore the opportunities provided by interdisciplinary research.

Three questions driving my work

• What is the impact of sufficiency-based scenarios on the economy, social structures, and geopolitics?
• How can we phase out fossil fuels without exceeding planetary boundaries or reducing social welfare?
• How can we use disruptive events to accelerate the energy transition and create resilient systems?

What the group works on

We model energy systems at multiple scales—from the household and industrial (micro) to the district (meso) and the national and continental (macro). In the lab, we investigate metal fuels, Carnot batteries, electrochemical batteries, and alternative fuels in combustion engines.

Methodological challenges

• Because we have limited knowledge about the hundreds of parameters in our models, how can we design robust systems?
• Because not everything can be modelled, how can we identify must-dos and must-avoids?

To address these, we develop methods for uncertainty quantification, near-optimal solution discovery (MGA), decision-tree analysis, and robust design optimization.

Louvain4Sufficiency

I am part of Louvain4Sufficiency, an interdisciplinary network at UCLouvain that studies sufficiency as a response to the ecological, energy, and social crises. It brings together researchers from across the university — engineering, economics, law, psychology, philosophy, and the political and social sciences are only some of the fields involved — to build shared, context-aware approaches to sufficiency, treating it as a priority lever before technological efficiency.