dr. AJK (Auke) Pols

Auke Pols is second secretary of the Examining Board Social Sciences at Wageningen University: his main responsibility is coordinating chair group visits to help safeguard validity, reliability, transparency and feasibility of education assessment.

Auke Pols is also lecturer in responsible innovation and the ethics of technology at the Knowledge, Technology and Innovation (KTI) group. As lecturer, he specialises in teaching critical reflection and ethics to students from the engineering, life and social sciences; as PhD coordinator, he is responsible for organising PhD skills training sessions.

Auke’s overarching research field is the organisation of responsibility in socio-technical systems. Specifically, his research interests include:

• Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) and how it can be institutionalised. Auke has developed this topic in the context of the Horizon 2020 project RRI Practice, investigating Wageningen University & Research as a case study;
• Innovation models for economic paradigms not oriented at sustained growth;
• The responsibility of technology and engineers for eliciting human behaviour. Auke has developed this topic in his PhD research;
• Responsibility in energy systems and energy transitions, particularly in the global South. Auke has developed this topic in NWO MVI projects on biofuel production in Tanzania, and on developing and implementing smart grids in India.

Auke's publications can be accessed through his Academia.edu site at https://wur.academia.edu/AukePols.

Thesis topics: can be any related to my research interests listed above. Here is a possible topic (with Mareike Smolka): How do researchers understand, experience and practice responsibility?