Team

The course responsible at the Faculty of Social Sciences is professor Birgit Kopainsky. The course is facilitated by a multi-faculty core team including Birgit Kopainsky (social sciences), Ingunn Johanne Ness (psychology/SLATE) and Hiwa Målen (reseach and innovation department).

Birgit Kopainsky

Birgit Kopainsky is professor in System Dynamics at the University of Bergen, Norway. She holds a PhD in agricultural economics and a master’s degree in Geography and Environmental Studies. Her research explores the role that system dynamics can play in facilitating transformation processes in social-ecological systems such as the transformation towards sustainable and resilient agri-food systems. She conducts and supervises research both in Europe and in developing countries.

Ingunn Johanne Ness

Dr. Ingunn Johanne Ness is a senior researcher and Cluster Leader at the Centre for the Science of Learning & Technology (SLATE). She has a PhD from the University of Bergen, Faculty of Psychology, Department of Education, and a postdoc from the Faculty of Psychology, SLATE. Ness leads the innovative research futures efforts in SLATE and carries out research on interdisciplinary collaboration, innovation, creativity, and leadership. Ness has a particular interest for the sociocultural approach and works with one of the world’s leading environments on sociocultural theory, the OSAT group at the Department of Education, University of Oxford and Webster Center for Creativity and Innovation (WCCI). In addition, Ness has close collaboration with business such as Equinor. She has a number of publications in International journals and Handbooks and her main teaching areas are creative knowledge processes, innovative methods and supervision of Master and PhD students. Ness is co-editor in a Special Issue in The Creativity Research Journal, Section Editor for the Palgrave Encyclopedia of the Possible, Associate Editor of The European Journal of Psychology and co-editor on Dialogical pedagogy, creativity and learning, KLIM forlag, Denmark.

Hiwa Målen

Hiwa Målen is senior research advisor at the research and innovation department at UiB with primary responsibility for the Horizon Europe Pillar II program, digital, industry and space. Until recently, Målen was Center manager at Digital Social Science Core Facility (DIGSSCORE), which is a research infrastructure for advanced social science data collection and multi-disciplinary research at the University of Bergen.

Målen holds a master’s and PhD degree in molecular biology from the University of Bergen, Norway. The scientific works of Hiwa Målen have contributed to the global effort to combat the tuberculosis disease. They are cited frequently in top scientific journals such as Nature communications and PNAS. In addition to his researcher background, Hiwa Målen has extensive project management expertise with several years’ experience as a project manager in the private sector, with responsibility for project portfolios covering maintenance & modification on the North Sea energy extraction installations. As Improvement Coordinator at the corporate level, the organisation applied his experiences and knowledge from project completions to educate next-generation project managers and streamline corporate processes towards increased efficiency and value creation. I 2015, the Leadership Foundation in Norway selected Målen as one of the Top10 role models in Norway for outstanding contributions to Norwegian business and society. His Majesty Crown Prince Haakon handed over the award.