How to choose a topic for your master’s thesis? “Few assignments can be as intimidating at university as writing a thesis,” acknowledges Master’s student Lais Bonetto. How do you pick your topic and how do you conduct your research? Find out what motivated Lais and her fellow students in their choices. Enter keywords...
Contributions from some 40 UNU-MERIT researchers and lecturers helped Maastricht University’s School of Business and Economics (SBE) claim second place out of almost 150 business schools in the Corporate Knights’ 2021 Better World MBA ranking. According to this latest global ranking, SBE is the #1 business school in Europe for sustainability, and the only EU-based school to feature in the Top 20. The ranking evaluated 147 business schools worldwide on their promotion of both social and environme...
“Hello everyone. First of all, I’d like to thank Julieta for having invited me to deliver this keynote and the MPP team for organizing this wonderful event. I’m honoured and delighted. Recent events have given credence to a buzzword used to describe certain markets: VUCA, as in Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous. This term now captures the essence of our entire world. Who would have imagined that a virus infestation would implode in China as an endogenous shock and be c...
A unique partnership between the United Nations University and Maastricht University in the south of the Netherlands, our Master in Public Policy and Human Development features seven specialisations. See our new video interviews for the inside track on all the above. ...
The current pandemic, the climate crisis and concerns over new technologies like Artificial Intelligence demand an open and clear dialogue between science and society. As we move forward to address these types of challenges, facts and scientific research need to feed community knowledge and play an important role in public decision-making. For this, effective research communication is key! Kendra Valck at the School of Business and Economics recently spoke about this topic with UNU-MERIT’s...
Franziska Gassmann hails from Switzerland but has lived in the Netherlands for thirty years and is allowed to vote in both countries. She enjoys the Dutch political debates, but is mystified by the Participation Act or the Dutch version of referendums, among other things. “In Switzerland, referendums are our life, so to speak! And if you don’t vote, you don’t get to complain.” Research into the low end of the socioeconomic spectrum “My research is about the low end of the socioeconomic spe...
He is a free spirit. “As a child I was always wandering around outside, building huts, counting stars.” He is self-deprecating: “I was interviewed for my PhD by a committee of old white men, a bit like myself now,” but also self-aware: “I consciously moved away from fundamental mathematics after my PhD.” As a leader, his main goal is to serve others. “You don’t shake hands with an institute, but with the people who work there. First and foremost I want to look at what everybody needs.” Bartel Va...
UNU-MERIT Migration Group Annual Report 2019 “I am proud to share with you the 2019 Annual Report of the Migration Group at UNU-MERIT. We enjoyed a successful year; it was a time for growth and change, with new strategic hires and an expansion of our capacity building and executive education programmes.” Prof. Dr. Melissa Siegel Enter keywords...
In October 2020, a team led by Stanford University’s John Ioannidis published an update of their ranking of the top 2% scientists in the world in the journal PLOS Biology. High up the ranking are several researchers from Maastricht University’s School of Business and Economics, with the innovation-related research at UNU-MERIT strongly represented. MERIT researchers René Kemp (also of the Maastricht Sustainability Institute) and Bart Verspagen rank in the top 0.5% of the career-spanning li...