Advisory Council

Laura J. Ahlstrom is an Assistant Professor of Economics at Oklahoma State University and currently serves as a member of the Committee on Economic Education of the American Economics Association. Her research specializes in economic education, and her work has appeared in academic journals, such as the AEA Papers & Proceedings, The Journal of Economic Education, The American Economist, and Perspectives on Economic Education Research.

Alexandra Arntsen is a Senior Lecturer in Economics at the Nottingham Business School and member of the steering group of Diversifying and Decolonising Economics (D-Econ). Her primary areas of teaching are Environmental & Resource Economics and Microeconomics and her research expertise lies in labour economics, ecological economics and feminist economics. She is the secretary of the Association for Heterodox Economics (AHE) and is also a member of the International Association for Feminist Economics (IAFFE).

Brent Bleys is assistant professor at Ghent University with a focus on ecological economics and sustainable development. Research interests include: Beyond GDP (including subjective well-being), post-growth, ecological macroeconomics and pro-environmental behaviour. Affiliated to the Center for Sustainable Development (Ghent University) and acting as a representative of the scientific community at the Federal Council for Sustainable Development (Belgium).

Wimar is director of Strategy and Policy at the Netherlands Organisation for Applied Scientific Research and assistant professor of Economics at Leiden University. Earlier he was active in local and national politics and civil service.

Harry van Dalen is professor of economics at Tilburg University, teaches history of economic thought and macroeconomics and he is a senior research associate at the Netherlands Interdisciplinary Demographic Institute (NIDI), an institute of the Dutch Royal Academy of Sciences (KNAW) where he works on issues of population ageing, migration and where is also managing editor of the Dutch journal Demos.

Heske serves as Director of Operations for the Young Scholars Initiative at the Institute for New Economic Thinking. She has an MSc in Economics from the Levy Economics Institute and a BA from Bard College.

Chandni Dwarkasing is a lecturer in Economics at SOAS University of London. Her research is focused on the labour-consumption-ecology nexus and the socio-economic repercussions of climate policies in Global North countries: domestically and abroad.

Irene’s interests are in the areas of economic education, assessment of learning, and inclusive excellence. She is Associate Professor of Economics and Director of Inclusive Excellence at the George Washington University, and currently serves as a member of the Committee on Economic Education of the American Economics Association.

Adriano La Gioia is a member of the Rethinking Economics Belgium network and a founding member of the Brussels local branch. he studied Economics and Political Sciences at the Free University of Brussels (ULB), where he had the opportunity to be a teaching assistant in various economics courses and to conduct some research on just transition. He is very interested in Social-ecological transitions, Ecological Economics, Post-growth and on how to contribute to societal change through educational reforms and projects.

Michelle Meixieira Groenewald is currently a lecturer at North-West University in South Africa and holds an MSc in Political Economy of Development from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) at the University of London. She is a contributor for the 2022 book by Manchester University Press titled: Reclaiming Economics for Future Generations, which discusses the importance of diversifying, decolonising and democratizing Economics. Michelle is a steering committee member of Diversifying and Decolonising Economics (D-Econ), and a member of Rethinking Economics for Africa.

Luca Kokol (she/her) is a research fellow at the Hamburg Institute for Social Research, studying the distributional effects of private and public money creation. For over two years, she has been working for the Network for Pluralist Economics on the promotion of a pluralist economics teaching. She holds a master degree in Macroeconomics, Finance and the Socioeconomic Transition from the EPOG+ program and a bachelor’s in Politics and Philosophy from the University of Stirling.

Charan van Krevel is a PhD candidate and passionate lecturer at the Radboud University department of Economics. His research focuses on how societies can achieve long-term prosperity and ‘Brede Welvaart’, while he is also committed to innovative, applicable, and real-world driven teaching and often reaches out to the wider public through lectures and media appearances. More information on Charan can be found here.

Tom Kuppens is assistant professor in economics teaching methodology and education for sustainable development at the School for Educational Studies of Hasselt University and the Multidisciplinary Institute for Teacher Education of Vrije Universiteit Brussel. He is also co-president of the COPERNICUS Alliance, i.e. the European Network on Higher Education for Sustainable Development. 

Jasper Lukkezen is editor in chief at Economisch Statistische Berichten (ESB), the Dutch journal on policy economics ESB, and assistent professor at Utrecht University. He is a macro economist who focusses on communicating economics. He wrote his PhD thesis on sovereign risk and has broad experience as a policy advisor on fiscal policy and macroeconomic stability.

Andrew Mearman is an Associate Professor of Economics at Leeds University Business School in the UK, specialising in economics education, pluralism and heterodox economics, economic methodology, and sustainability. He is a former Co-ordinator of the Association for Heterodox Economics and was recently a member of the UK QAA Economics subject benchmarking advisory panel.

Tommaso Mondovì is an Environment and Society student at Radboud University and board member of Rethinking Economics Nijmegen. He is currently completing his master thesis on the topic: “A Call-Out for Pluralism in Economics Education”. He is passionate about educational systems, how these influence our society and the replication of mainstream ideas and how these could possibly be challenged.

Lars Niehaus is a fourth-year student at University College Maastricht and an active member of PINE Maastricht, a student committee aiming at fostering debate about pluralism in economics. Through PINE, he is in frequent contact with students from various backgrounds, trying to change how economics is taught.

Pratistha Joshi Rajkarnikar is Assistant Director of the Economics in Context Initiative at the Boston University Global Development Policy Center, where she works on developing educational materials on innovative and inclusive approaches to teaching economics. Her research interests broadly focus on economic development, macroeconomic theory and policy, and feminist economics.

Vinzenz Ziesemer is the Director of the Instituut voor Publieke Economie, a think tank based in the Netherlands. He previously worked for the Ministry of Finance of the Netherlands and holds a PhD from the European University Institute.

Esther-Mirjam Sent is Professor of Economic Theory and Policy at Radboud University and Chair of the Labor Party in the Netherlands. She holds a PhD from Stanford University, obtained under the supervision of Nobel Laureate Kenneth Arrow.

Irene van Staveren is professor of pluralist development economics at the Institute of Social Studies of Erasmus University Rotterdam. She is board member of Rethinking Economics NL and author of the pluralist textbook ‘Introduction to Economics from a Pluralist and Global Perspective (Routledge, 2015).

Dr Tim Thornton is the Director of the School of Political Economy and a Senior Research Fellow at both the Economics in Context Initiative at Boston University and the Global Development and Environment Institute at Tufts University. Tim has a particular interest in pluralism and interdisciplinarity in the study of economic phenomena.

Eileen is a Senior Lecturer in Economics at Queen Mary University of London and an Editorial Board member of CORE Economics Education.

William was chairman of the Economic and Development Review Committee at the OECD and Head of the Monetary and Economic Department of the Bank for International Settlements (BIS). He is famous for flagging the wild behaviour in the debt markets, being one of the earliest to have predicted the 2008 global financial crisis.