Dr. Yang Chen

Dr. Yang Chen is a postdoc researcher and lecturer in the Governance and Inclusive Development (GID) programme group of the AISSR. As a researcher, Yang is developing a Stranded Assets Index and an interactive atlas for the project CLIFF (Climate Change and Fossil Fuel), an ERC Advanced Grant to Joyeeta Gupta, under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (contract number 101020082). As a lecturer, Yang obtained his BKO (UTQ) in 2022 from 4TU and teaches various GIS&Spatial Analysis courses and supervises BSc and MSc thesis students at University of Amsterdam.

Yang holds a PhD in Environmental Science from Wageningen University & Research, with his thesis entitled "Exploring the effects of feedbacks on land system behaviour -- A Complex Adaptive Systems approach". During his PhD, Yang explored phenomena such as regime shift, tipping points, and hysteresis via stereotypical agent-based land models, which explicitly considered how individual land users interact with each other (learning, imitation, competition) and how feedback loops (e.g., positive feedback of the economies of scale, negative feedbacks such as soil degradation and price elasticity) govern the system dynamics and resilience of land systems. Yang obtained his MSc Cum Laude, in Geo-Information Science and Earth Observation, with a specialisation in Urban Planning and Management from University of Twente. Before coming to the Netherlands, Yang finished his BSc in Geographical Information Science/Geography from Beijing Normal University. 

Before joining University of Amsterdam, Yang worked as a postdoc researcher at University of Twente on the project SECBIVIT--Scenarios for providing multiple ecosystem services and biodiversity in viticultural landscapes. In this project, Yang investigated how different viticultural landscapes across Europe respond to policy designs and climate change scenarios by simulating to what extent these regions can sustain the provision of food and various ecosystem services such as soil protection, landscape aesthetics, and biodiversity conservation. He collaborated with social and natural scientists from 11 institutions around the world and developed agent-based models in which empirical evidence of winegrowers’ decision-making and various ecological impacts were integrated. With this project, Yang was also selected as a fellow at the Postdoc Academy for Transformational Leadership (2020-2022). 

As a scientist, Yang aims to advance the scientific understanding of resilience and sustainability in land systems or other Socio-Ecological Systems across spatial and temporal scales; as a teacher, he aims to enable the future changemakers to holistically identify, understand, analyse, and solve real-world problems; as a citizen he wants to be actively involved in societal transformations, to advise, facilitate, and enable transition of behaviours that affect sustainability and climate change; and as a colleague, he aims to learn and collaborate with others from various academic backgrounds to co-define and address both scientific and practical challenges through interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary lens.

Yang is Miao Chinese (an ethnic minority) and was a Chinese Teenage Goodwill Ambassador to Thailand (2005).