Team Blonk Consultants continues to grow
Meet our two new colleagues: Davide and David
The Blonk Consultants team has expanded again! Two new colleagues joined us during the past month – but of course, in this time of Corona both are working from home. Davide Lucherini is a consultant and David Wichmann is our new data & model specialist. Welcome to our team, we are happy to have you on board!
Davide Lucherini
Consultant
Nature is so complex and vulnerable that it can only inspire a profound sense of respect in us. In my vision, the idea of sustainable living is simply a consequence of understanding nature. My connection with nature has deep roots, as I had the luck to grow up in the beautiful Tuscan countryside, where I spent a lot of time on all sorts of outdoor activities, such as hiking, fishing and learning how to grow vegetables. I moved to Bologna to study Environmental Engineering and completed a one-year Erasmus project at the University of Valencia. Besides acquiring very valuable technical skills, I also became curious about the bigger picture of sustainability. I decided to enrol in the Master’s course in Sustainable Development at Utrecht University, where I engaged with a broader spectrum of disciplines and met an inspiring international community. My thesis project took me to Nicaragua for three months to investigate possible climate adaptation strategies for smallholder farmers.
Understanding the close connection between food and sustainability, I also realised the profound changes that are needed both in the food sector and in our approach to food. After a year working as a food and sustainability analyst, I am really enthusiastic about starting a new chapter at Blonk Consultants. I am eager to work towards better solutions to help the food sector in this urgent transition to sustainable approaches.
David Wichmann
Model & Data Specialist
I have Bachelor’s degrees in Physics and Economics from Heidelberg University, where part of my work was related to Environmental Physics, trying to understand if climatic change 20,000 years ago had an effect on the large-scale ocean circulation. Fascinated by the global challenges facing my generation, I went to Tsinghua University in Beijing to take a Master of Public Administration in International Development, graduating on the topic of energy consumption and carbon emissions related to urbanisation in China. After returning, I finished my Master’s in Theoretical Physics in Cologne while working for an energy consultancy and teaching programming to refugees. I came to the Netherlands for my PhD in Ocean Physics at Utrecht University, working on plastic transport in the ocean and complex systems approaches for structure detection in oceanography.
After my daughter was born in early 2019, I realised that I need to work on making our lifestyles and economic activities more sustainable. I believe that making the global food system more sustainable is indispensable for staying within planetary boundaries and for leaving behind a functioning ecosystem that can provide for the generations to come. I am therefore glad to have started as Model & Data Specialist at Blonk Consultants. It gives me the chance to play an active role in addressing the important sustainability challenges of our time. At the same time, I am fascinated by the complexity of food value chains and the computational challenges in modelling food systems.