Emilie, you made it! Here we want to congratulate you for finishing your PhD journey with great care, passion and style!

Defense Emilie – shortly before it started

Last Thursday, we witnessed the PhD defense by Emilie on her thesis “Learning Through Modeling – Novel Computational Approaches for Exploring the Dynamics of Learning and Self-governance in Social-ecological Systems”. Within 25 minutes, she presented two papers on the topic learning-by-doing where she explored the learning process connected to fish harvesting with neural network models, and two papers on self governance in small scale fisheries with an agent-based model along a case study in Mexico. (Among the four presented papers, one is also published here).

The opponent James Dyke from Southampton University had the stage after the presentation to reflect on Emilie’s thesis before the round of questions from him and the committee. James was clearly a fan of the methods that Emilie used and remarkably was his comment on how to see that an agent-based model is of good quality – it is published with an ODD+D description!

Further honored guests in the committee were Maricela de La Torre Castro – Stockholm University, Håkan Eggert – University of Gothenburg, Olivier Barreteau – Irstea, Montpellier, and Anne- Sophie Crépin – Beijer Institute of Ecological Economics. Garry Peterson lead through the discussion which took approximately two hours including the short commentary by James. The supervisors were Maja Schlüter, Jon Norberg (SRC) & Örjan Ekeberg (KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm).

Besides the ‘spikning’ (nailing of the thesis two weeks earlier) and a get-together after the defense, it became a tradition to round up the finished PhD at our institute with a great party. Emilie’s joyful celebration was yesterday evening together with her family, friends and colleagues. We heard so many sincere, passionate speeches, framed by toasts and some swedish drinking songs, underlined by super good food and lovely, creative music-videos by her SRC colleagues (Thank you Jamila, for joining this activity even from the distant Pamirs!). The ‘program’ went until far after midnight and the dancing even further …

Our lobby decorated and prepared for dinner.

The greatest thing of all is the fact that we did not have to say goodbye to Emilie since she will continue her post-doc with our group!