Summary

I am a PhD candidate at KU Leuven, supervised by Professor Steven Van de Walle and embedded in the DemoTrans project. My expected graduation will take place in October 2026. In my dissertation, I study how government contracts for policy goals in hollow states such as Belgium, Germany, and the United States. I analyze big procurement data and conduct experiments. From June to July 2024, I completed a research stay at the Evans School, University of Washington, with Professor Benjamin M. Brunjes.

I am interested in buying, selling and grantmaking in the public sector. How does public administration work together with contractors in pursuit of public policy? How can public administration ensure the supply of critical goods, services, and works? My theoretical orientation is captured in the following keywords: public interest goals, strategic public procurement, hollow state, robust governance.

Grounded in pragmatist research philosophy, I mainly apply two kinds of methods: modeling processes (conditional process analysis, BPMN) and machine learning (text as data, STM, BERT, causal forest, random forest). I use R in general and Python for some machine learning tasks.

I hold a Master of Science in Public Sector Innovation and eGovernance from KU Leuven, Münster University and TalTech, graduating summa cum laude with the congratulations of the examination committee. I hold a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science from the Otto Suhr Institute at Freie Universität Berlin, including an Erasmus year at University College London.

Prior to my PhD, I worked as an analyst on large-scale IT projects at national and European Union authorities and as a business developer at a GovTech startup. This is where I got to know government contracting first-hand.