Response Doctoral Programme

Bessie Noll, a RESPONSE fellow in the PhD program Science and Policy, successfully completed her PhD this past September! Her dissertation, entitled “Modeling the Low-carbon Road Transport Transition: Policy Insights and Implications”, seeks to expand our comprehension of how public policy can accelerate transformative change in the road transport sector towards low-carbon technologies. The thesis argues and demonstrates that policymakers need up-to-date, quantitative, approaches to evaluate and project dynamic technology competition and to assess prospective policy impacts on the transition.

Bessie’s research journey allowed her to explore various aspects of her chosen topic, centering around the heavy-duty trucking sector. She produced two pivotal papers for Applied Energy and PNAS; the first paper presented a snapshot cost comparison of different commercial vehicle drive-technologies and applications in Europe, while the latter introduced a global model for projecting the competition of various commercial vehicle drive-technologies. Importantly, this model offered a novel approach to theorize the influence of national policy interventions on worldwide technological evolution through spillover effects. In addition, Bessie’s exploration included the passenger vehicle sector, resulting in a publication on vehicle charging in Nature Communications and a study on balancing EV adoption with taxation, which is currently under review.

Bessie’s PhD journey was highlighted by several notable experiences, including a meaningful mid-doctorate secondment at the Schweizerische Energie-Stiftung. This period was marked by a poignant return to Japan, her childhood home, where she reconnected with and reflected on the events of March 11th, 2011. Her two-month stay in Japan in 2021 was dedicated to capturing and reporting on the decade-long aftermath of the Tohoku earthquake and the Fukushima nuclear disaster.

In addition to this significant project, throughout her PhD, Bessie actively participated in numerous conferences (many virtual, some in person), mentored four master’s students through their thesis projects, enjoyed a productive research stint at Sweden’s Chalmers University, wrote a few blog articles for the ETH Energy Blog, and engaged in various local initiatives related to her research field in Switzerland.

As for next steps, it seems both academia and Zurich are hard to shake. Following her PhD, Bessie will stay on as a Post Doctoral Researcher in the Energy and Technology Policy Group at ETH Zurich where her focus will shift towards the low-carbon transport transition in developing economies and refining and improving the representation of technological innovation in Integrated Assessment Models. She is excited about the continuation of her work and to be around a while longer to see the rest of the RESPONSE cohort graduate.

The RESPONSE program office dearly congratulates to your successful PhD defense and wishes you all the best for your future. It was a pleasure having you in our PhD program and the RESPONSE Doctoral Program.

Featured photo is ETH-licensed from Adobe Stock.