News

By Josh Tendai, Alumni Officer at UNU-MERIT  Last Friday (12 April), we held the ‘Careers Beyond Borders’ hybrid career event at UNU-MERIT in collaboration with the United Nations Student Association (UNSA) Maastricht. Aimed at students aspiring to make a difference in the world, this event illumina...

By Ari Perdana, dual career PhD fellow at UNU-MERIT In March this year, the 2022 cohort of UNU-MERIT’s dual career (DC) PhD fellows celebrated the second anniversary of the start of their PhDs. Two weeks ago, over dinner in a noodle restaurant near Maastricht’s Jekerkwartier, Adam Adou, Rodrigo Lópe...

Each year in March, UNU-MERIT’s PhD Office organizes a week-long event known as Research Week, offering a dedicated time for PhD fellows to focus on their research and connect with peers. But what exactly does the Research Week entail, and how does it benefit the institute as a whole? Basking in the...

By Victor Osei Kwadwo (researcher and lecturer, UNU-MERIT) and Rose Camille Vincent (Assistant Professor, Utrecht University) Education drives economic growth and individual well-being. Secondary education, in particular, plays a crucial role. In recent decades, this recognition has encouraged sever...

By Nanditha Mathew and Bernardo Caldarola (UNU-MERIT researchers and co-organisers of our Economic Fitness and Complexity Summer School) The science of complex systems can play an important role in understanding social and economic dynamics but its application to economics has not yet been fully exp...

5 days, state-of-the-art research, top experts In June 2023, UNU-MERIT co-organised a summer school on economic fitness and complexity (EFC) together with the Enrico Fermi Research Centre in Rome (CREF). The five-day event brought together 26 speakers – from as far afield as Peking University ...

  On 19-20 February 2024, UNU-MERIT hosted the final symposium of CatChain (‘Catching–up along the global value chain: models, determinants and policy implications in the era of the fourth industrial revolution’), a major four-year EU-funded research project. Led by Bocconi Universi...

Michelle González Amador – who is currently completing her full-time PhD at UNU-MERIT – has been involved with the multi-institutional initiative Mechanism Design for Social Good (MD4SG) for several years and was previously the organiser of the Latin America and Caribbean Working Group. ...

By Victor Osei Kwadwo, researcher and lecturer at UNU-MERIT In March 2023, three friends and I – all of us graduates of UNU-MERIT’s PhD programme – were thrilled when we stumbled upon a research fellowship opportunity in Africa, our home continent. Unfortunately, it turned out that the call was for ...

  In December, the latest international climate negotiations at the 2023 United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP28) made headlines around the world, as expected – but, as UNU-MERIT researcher Sanae Okamoto argues in an op-ed written for The Japan Times, two major achievements of thi...

  Last week, the European Commission launched its European Research Area Policy Platform, aspects of which researchers from UNU-MERIT and Maastricht University worked on as part of a larger consortium.   About the European Research Area Launched in 2000, the European Research Area (ERA) ai...

NEMO Kennislink – the Dutch science journalism platform of NEMO, the largest science museum in the Netherlands – has recently published two news pieces, one discussing how African remote employees could help solve the Netherlands’ major shortage of IT professionals, and the other f...

When it comes to summarizing all that an institute as diverse as UNU-MERIT achieves in a year, where does one begin? Our work spans education programmes and capacity development efforts to media engagement and thought leadership to research projects big and small, and so much more. Nevertheless, we&...

Researcher and photographer Mariajose Silva Vargas is about to complete her full-time PhD at UNU-MERIT (defending on 24 January) and now works as a Research and Policy Manager at Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab Europe (J-PAL Europe). In this interview, she shares some highlights from both her ...

By Conrad Nunnenmacher (PhD fellow, UNU-MERIT), Franziska Gassmann (Professorial Fellow, UNU-MERIT) and Julieta Morais (researcher, UNU-MERIT) The economic fallout of COVID-19 left people around the world facing a significant threat to their livelihood. As governments scrambled to mitigate the pande...

On 13 to 15 December, the Global Refugee Forum 2023 – the world’s largest international gathering on refugees – took place in Geneva, Switzerland. Launched in 2019 and held once every four years, the Forum assembles world leaders to discuss international progress on the four key objectiv...

The topic of health, both mental and physical, is taking an increasing amount of space in climate change discussions and negotiations. According to the World Health Organization, climate-related health damages are estimated to cost up to USD 4 billion by 2030, with outsize impacts on developing nati...

Our resident mental health expert, Sanae Okamoto, was recently interviewed by the UN Regional Information Centre (UNRIC) in Brussels about her research – below follows an except of the Q&A that was published on the UNRIC website on 5 December 2023. Can you elaborate on some specific exampl...

  Four UNU-MERIT researchers (Sanae Okamoto, Shyama Ramani, Rasmus Lema and Alejandro Álvarez-Vanegas) have co-authored articles for a COP 28 bookazine from the global affairs media network Diplomatic Courier, entitled COP 28: Saving Gaia to Save Ourselves.   This special edition, which wa...

New book distills three decades of learnings on survey design  Despite all the digital and virtual means by which the world is connected, when it comes to a researcher in, say, Brussels trying to get to know a community in, say, Almaty on a level that’s technical, substantial and deep enough to incl...