Senior Research Associate, Research Institute for Sustainability, Helmholz Centre Potsdam
Biography
Marianne has been a researcher at the Research Institute for Sustainability Helmholz Centre Potsdam for 11 years (formerly the Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies). Prior to joining the institute, she worked in the oil and gas industry for five years on projects including conventional oil and gas, shale gas and coal bed methane exploration as well as geothermal drilling projects worldwide. Her experiences of the human implications of hydrocarbon exploration around the world led her to her research at RIFS and, more recently, to her PhD which she completed in September 2024. She joined the ‘Role and Potential of Unconventional Gas’ group at RIFS in 2013 and her work encompassed all aspects of the shale gas debate but specifically stakeholder dialogue and public engagement across Europe as well as greenhouse gas and air pollutant emissions associated with a possible shale gas development in Europe. Marianne then joined the Arctic Governance research group from 2016 to 2024 and recently joined the Planetary Geopolitics Research Group. Her research focuses largely on oil and gas resources in Arctic regions and questions of resource estimates, scientific knowledge production, use and communication. The title of her PhD thesis was ‘The Oil and Gas Geologist’s Arctic in the Age of the
Anthropocene – Knowledge, Politics and Imaginative
Geologies’ and brought her geological training (BSc. Earth Science and MSc. Micropalaeontology) to bear on questions of the politics of geology and of geological knowledge production in the 21st Century.
Marianne lives in Potsdam with her husband and three children and is a keen marathon runner.
