We congratulate the Master of Science students Kobe De Maeyer and Lukas Röhrich to the successful defenses of their thesis projects on March 10th 2025. Both students carried out projects throughout the last year as part of our ERSU Team.
In his thesis, Kobe developed novel methods for multivariate tipping detection and clustering within the Tipping and Other Abrupt events Detector (TOAD), a modular toolkit under development at PIK aimed to facilitate a systematic tipping risk assessment as envisioned in TIPMIP. The extended multivariate methodology enables users to screen for consistent tipping signals across multiple gridded datasets simultaneously and, hence, contributes to a more structured and scalable approach for future multi-model assessments. The thesis was supervised by Dr. Sina Loriani and Prof. Dr. Ricarda Winkelmann, situated under the tipping risks theme of ERSU. Kobe is associated with University of Potsdam.
Lukas' work focuses on understanding social tipping events and how they can be guided. In his work, a novel opinion dynamics model on social networks is presented. It combines the classic Adaptive Voter Model with contagion model attributes, like a dose memory and an infection threshold. His thesis describes and analyzes an agent-based simulation, as well as a macroscopic approximation model, leading to a coupled set of differential equations, using tools based in statistical mechanics and non-linear dynamics. The project was carried out in the WhESA theme under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Jürgen Kurths (not in picture) and Dr. Jonathan Donges. Lukas is associated with the Humboldt University of Berlin.
Also in picture is Prof. Dr. Johan Rockström, one of the co-leads of ERSU. The image was taken during the team retreat at Springbachmühle, Bad Belzig, GER.
