Benedikt Herrmann

After graduating in molecular biology at the University of Bayreuth, Germany, and gaining several years of experience as a program director for future leaders in Russia, Benedikt embarked on a PhD in experimental economics at the University of Göttingen, Germany. He extensively conducted laboratory experiments on civil cooperation in Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine. As a postdoc at the Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, he researched trust behaviour in the Gulf countries. In 2008, he joined the European Commission (EC). From 2011 to 2016, he led the “Behavioral Economics Team” at the Joint Research Centre of the EC. Responding to a call from the Support Group for Ukraine of the EC, he served in a diplomatic role in Kyiv to support the decentralization reform in Ukraine from 2016 to 2020. Since 2020, he has been back at the Joint Research Centre working on territorial development. Benedikt has published in different fields of science, with his work appearing in journals such as "Science," the "American Economic Review," and "Materials Science and Engineering."