Team of experts

Core Team

Dr. Jürgen Perschon

Dr. Jürgen Perschon

Vice President

 

Jürgen has professional working experience in the transport sector of developed and developing countries since 1995, predominantly on transport planning, road safety, low-cost public and non-motorized transport as well as gender-related transport in rural and urban Africa and in the European context. The current work focuses on the relation between transport and CO2 emission reduction/climate change, transport and the Millennium Development Goals, Poverty alleviation, Environmental Protection and Road Safety. In Africa he has carried out long and short-term field studies (household based socio-economic re-search, project impact monitoring studies) in Uganda, Rwanda, Kenya, Senegal and Ghana, Botswana and South Africa. Moreover he has given lectures and trainings to transport ministries, municipalities, transport NGOs but also at universities in Germany and China

Since 1995 Jürgen Perschon has consulted for GTZ, the German Agency for Technical Co-operation. Since 2003 he has been working with the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy (ITDP USA), based in New York and was Executive Director of the European Section of the Institute for Transport and Development Policy (ITDP Europe).

Rumbi Ebbefeld

Rumbi Ebbefeld

Project Coordinator and Finacial Director

 

Rumbi did her studies in Environmental and Resources Management which included different aspects such as renewable energy, sustainable development and emissions reduction. Before moving to Hamburg for her Masters, Rumbi worked with Global2030 in Berlin, an organisation which provides information and suggests action on the most urgent global challenges of the 21st century. During her Masters, she worked on a bicycle project in her home country Zimbabwe on improving the access to education for school children through the use of bicycles. Her project focused on reviewing schools that received bicycles through donation programmes compared to schools that did not, to see if this improved access through bicycles had a significant impact on aspects such as school grades. Rumbi joined the EURIST Team at the beginning of 2017 as a bike project coordinator.

Maximilian Heinrich

Maximilian Heinrich

Mobility Expert

 

Maximilian is a geographer and joined EURIST in 2013. The aim of Mr. Heinrich’s work is to understand urban planning as a transdisciplinary field of research and work and to provide decision makers with new ideas and perspectives for urban design with a focus on sustainable mobility. Of particular importance to him is the triad of social, ecological and economic concerns in order to make urban development fair and sustainable. In addition to his work as office manager, the areas of data collection and evaluation from the transport sector, as well as their analysis and presentation via GIS are part of his work.

As a member of the Bicycle / E-Bike team, Maximilian is committed to two-wheel mobility in sub-Saharan Africa in order to provide rural areas in particular with a cost-effective and environmentally friendly means of transport.

Maximilian works alongside EURIST as a freelance mobility expert, focusing on advising local authorities and companies on how to make mobility more sustainable.

 

Matthias Nüßgen

Matthias Nüßgen

Vice Executive Director

 

Matthias Nüßgen is a geographer and urban planner with degrees from the Humboldt University in Berlin and the University of Applied Sciences in Stuttgart. He has worked for various consulting firms and planning offices on different perspectives of sustainable transport, especially in the areas of public transport and non-motorised transport, and focuses on the functional integration of urban development and transport planning in order to achieve ecologically, socially and economically sustainable urban development by creating synergies between the two areas.

Matthias Nüßgen has been working with Eurist since 2011. Since 2016 he has led the organisation together with Managing Director Dr. Jürgen Perschon.

He held training courses and lectures on sustainable mobility at various national and international universities. In 2012 and 2013 he was a lecturer in urban planning at the TU Darmstadt.

At Eurist he tries to strengthen the perspective of urban development in implementation procedures of urban transport systems in order to adapt them to an economically, ecologically and socially resilient urban development paradigm based on proximity, accessibility and access to opportunities.

Since 2013 he has been working with EURIST on participation procedures, case studies and feasibility studies for the initiation and implementation of urban cableway projects in various African cities such as Dar es Salaam, Accra, Addis Ababa, Lusaka, Kigali, Gaborone and Harare, in addition to projects in Europe and especially in Germany.

 

Alexander Czeh

Alexander Czeh

Transport Policy Advisor

 

Alexander gained his knowledge on sustainable mobility from his PhD program at the Institute of Sustainable Urbanism at TU  Braunschweig, the MBA in Sustainable Mobility Management at TU Berlin, an M. Sc. in Transport Economics from the TU Dresden and through various consulting projects. In his consulting projects he focuses on active mobility, gender in transport, cargobike development, youth mobility, paratransit, traffic transformation and spatial justice analyses. Beside his focus on sustainable mobility he has conducted various projects in urban and traffic planning, logistics, institutional framework development and transport politics. Alexander has gained an in-depth knowledge of the conditions of transport markets in developing and emerging countries with focus on sustainable transport solutions and transport politics. He has worked in projects onsite in Georgia, Germany, Kazakhstan, Laos, Liberia, Ukraine, Saudi Arabia, Tanzania and Vietnam as a researcher, consultant, GIS analyst and traffic planner for universities, international cooperation institutions and the private sector. He has advised international cooperation institutions, ministries at state-level, given lectures at universities, led case studies and contributed to various specialist publications. Alexander joined EURIST in

Christof Hertel

Christof Hertel

Research Coordinator

Christof is a geographer and is finishing a PhD on the eco-social governance of international transport chains at the Hamburg University of Technology. At the same time, he has been a Project Coordinator at the European Section of the Institute for Transport and Development Policy (ITDP Europe) since 2007. He is currently overseeing a research study that aims to identify and assess the CO2 reduction possibilities in freight transport in Europe.
Christof received his undergraduate degree and master’s degree from the Free University of Berlin in Transport Science, Political Economy and Environmental Management. He wrote his master’s thesis on the mobility problems resulting from the South African apartheid and how they could be overcome through bicycle use. Christof is founding member of EURIST.

Sven Schulze

Sven Schulze

Research Coordinator

 
Sven Schulze is an economist with specific interest in all matters relating to environmental issues and one of his foci is on sustainable transport. He is a professor of economics at the FOM University of Applied Sciences in Hamburg. Besides, he is a partner at the consultancy Economic Trends Research in Hamburg. Until 2016 he lead the department energy, climate and environment at the Hamburg Institute of International Economics (HWWI). Initially, Sven Schulze received his PhD from the Helmut-Schmidt-University in Hamburg after studying economics at the University of Hamburg.
Patrick Kayemba

Patrick Kayemba

Research Coordinator

 
Patrick is a Development Practitioner, Researcher, Trainers, NGO Manager, Planner and Social Development Change Agent with an MA in Community Based Development of Nkumba University. He has over 15 years of experience in coordinating and managing development projects of all nature that include structural development, evaluation of programs, support in agro based enterprises, and poverty alleviation initiatives.

He has special expertise in advocacy for good governance and promotion of Non-motorized Transport solutions, poverty eradication issues, and unfairness in trade and food insecurities at household level. His extensive involvement in programs includes proposal writing as a fundraising strategy, carrying out participatory research, baseline surveys, program designing and implementation based on the logical framework analysis. He has been involved in monitoring and evaluation plans for different programs. He has vast experience in working with and managing people/ communities of different cultures and ethnic settings. This experience involves hands on in community mobilization; participatory planning processes using different participatory approaches. As a development worker, he is involved in developing strategic directions for varying organizations as an approach to achieving quality and sustainable outputs.

Patrick is currently the Director – of EURIST Africa Ltd. / Kampala.

Jens Müller

Jens Müller

Research Coordinator

 
Jens left his native Germany after school to live and work as a volunteer with handicapped people in France. He fell in love with the country and its language and thus went on to study Franco-German relations in Regensburg (Germany) and Clermont-Ferrand (France). He also did

internships in Egypt, Tunisia and Belgium to develop his intercultural skills and gain hands-on experience in international cooperation and business.

His interest in European affairs then brought him to Europe’s capital, Brussels (Belgium), where he graduated with a Master in European Economy in 2010. Between then and 2018, Jens worked as transport policy advisor to Michael Cramer, Member of the European Parliament and chairman of the Transport Committee from 2014 to 2017. He specialized in infrastructure policies, railway regulation and urban mobility. Since March 2018, he works as freelance expert on sustainable mobility and has joined the EURIST team to bring in his experience and language skills. Currently he also is a guest lecturer at the Technical University of Dortmund, Germany.

Expert Network

Jeffrey Kenworthy

Jeffrey Kenworthy

Transport Expert

 
Jeff Kenworthy has spent 40 years in the transport and urban planning field and currently teaches courses and supervises postgraduate students in the urban sustainability fields, focussing on transport and particularly car dependence. His research focuses on large international comparisons of cities from a transport and land use perspective. He is author/co-author of a number of books as well as over 200 other book chapters and journal publications in the area of urban planning, transport and sustainability and has lectured in over 30 countries and 100 cities worldwide. One of his latest books with Peter Newman is The End of Automobile Dependence: How Cities are Moving Beyond Car-Based Planning(Island Press, 2015). He has received two awards from the German government for his research and teaching in the field, including a Mercator Guest Professorship (Goethe University), a DAAD 2-year teaching fellowship at the FUAS, and is currently a guest professor at the Frankfurt University of Applied Sciences. His latest full colour book is the second edition of An Introduction to Sustainable Transportation: Policy, Planning and Implementationwith Preston Schiller published by Routledge.
Dr. Dieter Schwela

Dr. Dieter Schwela

President, Expert on Air Pollution and Emissions

 
Dr. Dietrich Schwela is educated physicist and worked from 1975 to 1994 in the development of the clean air implementation plans in North-Rhine Westphalia, Germany. From 1994 to 2003 Dr Schwela was responsible for the normative work of the World Health Organization Headquarters in Geneva in the field of air quality. From April 2003 to March 2005 Dr Schwela was working at the Institute for Health and Consumer Protection of the European Commission Joint Research Centre, Ispra, Italy, in the field of exposure to and health impacts of releases of chemicals from consumer products. Since 2005 Dr Schwela was associated with the Stockholm Environment Institute at the University of York, UK, working on issues of air quality management, environmental noise management and sustainable transport. Since 2014 is working as a freelance consultant on issues of air quality management, greenhouse gas mitigation, and sustainable transport solutions.
Joachim Bergerhoff

Joachim Bergerhoff

EURIST Transport Policy Analyst and Urban Ropeway Expert

 
Joachim earned his Master degree in political sciences with a thesis on Local Government facing the Challenge of Mobility in 1992. Since that time, he has been active on all fronts of sustainable mobility as secretary of the bicycle advocacy GRACQ and founding member of ProVélo (Brussels). He continued his career in a regional consultancy working for the EU THERMIE programme, dealing with energy efficiency and land use planning. He then joined the general secretariat of the International Association of Public Transport (UITP), where he focused on public transport organization, statistics, marketing and product innovation, until he was nominated Deputy Head of Staff of the Minister of Transport of the Walloon Region (Belgium), from 1999 to 2002. From 2007 to 2011, Joachim was the transport & mobility expert of the UN-HABITAT Municipal Spatial Planning Support Program in Kosovo, where he advised several municipalities and the central institutions on transport planning issues, the organization of public transport and the promotion of “active mobility”, i.e. walking and cycling. Joachim takes special interest in African urban transport and mobility issues, which he has studied during several visits over recent years.

Advisory Board

Michael Cramer

Michael Cramer

A member of the European Parliament since 2004 and member of its “Committee on Transport and Tourism”.
Dr. Axel Friedrich

Dr. Axel Friedrich

An eminent German expert on environmentally friendly transport and former head of the Transport Department in the German Environmental Federal Office.
Prof.Carsten Gertz

Prof.Carsten Gertz

Professor of urban structure and transport planning at the Technische Universität Hamburg – Harburg.
Prof. Heiner Monheim

Prof. Heiner Monheim

Spatial Planning Professor at Trier University, whose work focuses on transport development and planning.

Kurt Bodewig

Kurt Bodewig

Baltic-Adriatic Core Network Corridor TEN-T and Mandate Innovative Financing Instruments
Directorate-General for Mobility and Transport.

Managing Board

Barbara Kipke

Barbara Kipke

Board Member

Christof Hertel

Christof Hertel

Board Member

Dr. Jürgen Perschon

Dr. Jürgen Perschon

Vice President

Dr. Dieter Schwela

Dr. Dieter Schwela

President