dr. MGR (Marianna) Siegmund-Schultze

Marianna is the lead of the Land Use and Food Security team at the business unit Agrosystems Research—Wageningen Plant Research. The team members work across Dynamic Expertise Groups of the business unit. These are in particular: ‘International projects’, ‘Agroecology & biodiversity’, ‘Social & transition sciences’, ‘Climate & soil’, ‘Grassland’ and ‘Agrivoltaics’.

In her role as senior scientist, Marianna develops and applies integrative and systemic approaches to understand and support the evolution and governance of coupled systems, in particular, farming and agri-food systems. She is passionate about interacting with diverse stakeholders, and combining qualitative and quantitative data. Concepts such as agroecology, regeneration and social-ecological systems are central to her interest as they address multiple interacting dimensions. Marianna has extensive experience in inter- and transdisciplinary cooperation.

Earlier, Marianna was a visiting professor at the Federal University of Pernambuco, UFPE, at Recife, Brazil, has coordinated the collaborative German-Brazilian research project INNOVATE on sustainable land and water management, based at the Technical University Berlin, was an assistant professor at Hohenheim University in tropical animal production, and coordinated a collaborative project on socioeconomic effects on biodiversity in Namibia and South Africa, based at Gießen University, Germany. Marianna worked for several years in different crop-livestock farms. She holds a certificate of organic farming from France.

Marianna studied Agricultural Sciences (Plant Sciences) at Bonn University and Göttingen University, Germany. Her graduation thesis was about socioeconomics of urban livestock farming in Burkina Faso in cooperation with CIRDES. Her PhD dealt with smallholder cattle keeping in the Eastern Amazon as part of a German-Brazilian cooperation of Göttingen University with EMBRAPA. Marianna holds a postdoctoral degree (“Habilitation”) in Livestock Husbandry Systems from Hohenheim University, Germany.