About us

Board of directors 

Dipl.-VW. Sha Xia  (chair)

Ms. Xia studied German language and literature at Tongji University Shanghai and Economics at Heidelberg University. Her research focuses on energy and climate-related financing and pricing instruments, greenhouse gas measurement, reporting and verification (MRV) and scenario analyses. From 2007 to 2013, Ms Xia worked at the IUWA as German-Chinese Coordinator for the BMBF research project “RECAST Urumqi”. In the current BMBF research project “RESURC”, she acts as project manager and is also responsible for coordinating networks of Chinese partners. 

Michael Seyboth (chair)

Is IUWA’s contact person for all IT-related questions. Besides the support of the internal network, he is responsible for everything to do with data acquisition, data management and data protection. Furthermore, he is an expert for the programming environments Microsoft Office, Microsoft Visual Studio, Delphi, RS1, Python, HTML and Java. 

Dr. Oliver Assmann (treasurer) 

Has a PhD in economics. He focuses on industrial material flow management, material flow controlling and the necessary instruments such as indicators or flow cost accounting systems. These topics were also the subject of his doctoral thesis.  

Dr. Thomas Ott (assessor) 


Team 

Dipl.-VW. Sha Xia  

See above

Kevin Fleckenstein 

Holds a bachelor’s degree in geography from the Friedrich Schiller University of Jena. His studies focus of interest are geoinformatics (GIS), i.e. the collection, analysis and processing of spatial data. His thematic focal points are global change, climate change, as well as resource and environmental analysis. He is currently writing his master’s thesis on resource consumption in Central Vietnam. 

Sophie Gindele 

Holds a bachelor’s degree in geography and South Asian Studies from Heidelberg university. Her main interests at university are the interconnections between environment and development. In her bachelor thesis she thematised a water dispute in Pakistan. The topic of her master thesis she is currently writing on focuses on racism in the Indian context.  

Laura Pfisterer  

Holds a bachelor’s degree in geography from Heidelberg university. Her main interests at university are urban research and planning in the development context. In her bachelor thesis she thematised the topic of urban resilience in the context of climate change. Recently she is doing her master’s degree with an emphasis on urban geography at Heidelberg University.  

Nan Xu 

Mr. Xu studied political science B.A. in Marburg and M.A. in Heidelberg. His focus is on bilateral relations between Germany and China in the context of the EU. His bachelor’s thesis deals with the impact of China’s rise on the EU in the economic and environmental fields. As part of the master’s thesis, he focuses increasingly on the influence of trade and environmental associations on German-Chinese cooperation.