Below you find a list of potential topics within the Land-Use Group.
Topic for a Bachelor Thesis: Communal catering for diet transition (Only bachelor, no master thesis!)
A transition of diets is an important lever to improve environmental footprints and ameliorate public health. Communal catering in schools, hospitals, workplaces and other settings are considered a promising entry point to start such a transition. The bachelor thesis should carry out a literature review, investigating the potential of communal catering. Ideally, it also develops a quantitative database. The research shall have a global focus, looking at communal catering in different international settings. The topic requires good knowledge of scientific literature research, enthusiasm for numbers, quantitative skills (e.g. with R or excel) and willingness to invest into learning programming languages. Good language skills in widely spoken languages (e.g. English, Chinese, French, Spanish, Indonesian, ...) are a plus in order to explore national statistics from various countries.
Background can be from all disciplines, for example: Economics, Public Health, Agriculture, Statistics, Geography, Politics, ..., as long as the topic fits the requirements of your course.
Please contact Benjamin Bodirsky (bodirsky@pik-potsdam.de) and David Meng-Chuen Chen (david.chen@pik-potsdam.de)
If you get in contact, we might also find together further interesting topics. Due to the complexity of the subject, we can only offer internships for 6 months or more, and master thesis supervision for 6 - 12 months. Unfortunately, we cannot offer payment for the internships or master thesis.
