Mattijs van Maasakkers will present a lecture in Knowlton Hall’s Gui Auditorium at 5:30 p.m. on Wednesday, December 2, 2015. The talk is free and open to the public.

Van Maasakkers is an assistant professor in the City and Regional Planning section at the Knowlton School of Architecture. Before moving to Columbus, he was a post-doctoral fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.

Van Maasakkers’ research and teaching focus on the role of science in environmental decision-making, specifically in the context of complex public disputes. He has conducted research on environmental conflicts in the United States, the European Union and South Africa. He has worked with the US Bureau of Reclamation, the US Geological Survey, the National Audubon Society and the Consensus Building Institute on the assessment and intervention in environmental conflicts in the Columbia and Mississippi River basins in the United States.

In 2013, Van Maasakkers received his doctorate in Urban and Regional Planning from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he also received a Master in City Planning degree in 2009. His dissertation, titled Trading Places: The Development of Markets for Ecosystem Services in the United States, provides an in-depth analysis of the creation of new institutions in the Pacific Northwest and the Chesapeake Bay watershed.