The sociologist Jannika Mattes, a junior lecturer at the Institute of Social Sciences, has been awarded the Science Prize by the Lower Saxony Ministry of Science and Culture.
The award, for which Prof. Dr Jannika Mattes was nominated in Category II (early-career researchers), comes with a cash prize of 10,000 euros. It is awarded annually to individuals who, in the period following their PhD, have distinguished themselves through outstanding academic work and contributions to the development of higher education. The jury recognised Mattes’ research into entrepreneurial innovation strategies and social change in the context of the energy transition.
Jannika Mattes studied European Economics at the University of Bamberg and joined the University of Oldenburg as a research assistant in 2007. Whilst working on her PhD, which she completed in 2010, she coordinated a German-French research project funded by the Volkswagen Foundation on the topic of ‘Regional learning in multinational corporations’. Since 2011, Mattes has been an assistant professor of the sociology of European societies. Research stays have taken her to Utrecht, Uppsala and London; in addition to her work in Oldenburg, she also spent a year as a visiting professor at the Centre for Innovation, Research and Competence in the Learning Economy (CIRCLE) at Lund University in Sweden. The Institute is one of the leading centres in the field of European innovation research.
In 2017, Mattes received the ‘Prize for Excellence in Research’ from the Oldenburg University Society (UGO). In early 2018, she was accepted into the prestigious Emmy Noether Programme of the German Research Foundation (DFG). Over a five-year period, the DFG is funding her junior research group on the topic of ‘Regional Energy Transition: The social processes of negotiation, norm-setting and learning in the wind energy sector’. In this project, she and her team are investigating how regions are transformed by wind energy.