Our Team

Prof. Reto Steiner is the Head of the DIGILOG project and the Dean of the ZHAW School of Management and Law. Before joining ZHAW in 2017, Reto was a member of the Executive Board at the Competence Center for Public Management at the University of Bern, Executive Director at the Swiss Institute for Public Management in Bern, and contract professor at the Free University of Bolzano. His research focuses on municipal and cantonal research, research on the digital transformation of the state, and research on semi-autonomous organizations and public enterprises.

Prof. Sabine Kuhlmann has been a Professor of Political Science, Administration, and Organization at the University of Potsdam since April 2013. Previously, she was a Professor of Comparative Administrative Science at the German University of Administrative Sciences in Speyer and a Visiting Professor at HU Berlin and the University of Konstanz. In her research, she focuses on governmental organizations, issues of state modernization, and questions of governance, regulation, and de-regulation with a focus on municipalities and local governments.

She has been Vice President of the European Group of Public Administration since September 2012. In addition, she has been a member of the German government's National Standards Control Council since September 2011. She is also Deputy Editor of the International Review of Administrative Sciences (IRAS) and a member of the editorial board of various other journals (including the Public Administration Review (PAR) and der moderne staat (DMS).  

Prof. Isabella Proeller holds the Chair of Public and Nonprofit Management at the University of Potsdam. Her research areas include strategic management in the public sector, management and leadership mechanisms of administration, performance management, and international administrative reforms. Isabella Proeller is the Potsdam Center for Policy and Management Board spokesperson and Principal Investigator in the DFG research project DIGILOG. She is a trained business economist and lawyer, (co-)editor of various journals. In addition, she served for many years on the board of the International Research Society on Public Management IRSPM and the European Group of Public Administration EGPA.

Prof. Renate Meyer is a Professor of Organization at Vienna University of Economics and Business Administration (WU) and Director of the Institute for Organization Studies and the Research Institute for Urban Management and Governance at WU. She also holds a professorship at Copenhagen Business School and is a visiting professor at Oxford University. Her research focuses on the governance of public organizations, the transformation of governance structures in the public sector, and new forms of intersectoral collaboration. For more information, visit: https://www.wu.ac.at/urban/team/leitung/rmeyer/  

Dr. Andreas Weiler is an Assistant Professor at the Institute for Computer Science (InIT) at the Zurich University of Applied Sciences (ZHAW). He is the Head of Program of the executive education program CAS in Information Engineering. He obtained his PhD in Computer Science from the University of Konstanz, Germany. His field of knowledge, as well as his work and research focus, encompass the following subjects: pattern recognition and event detection, stream processing and real-time stream analytics, and information retrieval and ethics.

Dr. Claire Kaiser is a research associate and project manager at the Institute of Public Management at the ZHAW School of Management and Law. She is involved in the DIGILOG project as a research associate at the PostDoc level. Before joining ZHAW, she worked at the Swiss Federal Statistical Office and the Competence Center for Public Management at the University of Bern. She holds a degree in economics and wrote her dissertation on municipal mergers. Her research and consulting focus is on local governance.

Dr. Tobias Polzer is an Assistant Professor at the Institute for Organization Studies at Vienna University of Economics and Business (WU). After completing his PhD in Public Management at WU, he worked at Queen's University Belfast, the University of Essex, and the University of Sussex. His research interests include public sector reform, particularly in digital transformation, governance, financial management, and procurement. In the DIGILOG project, he is involved in developing the current state of research on digital transformation and producing case studies of selected municipalities.

Justine Marienfeldt is a research associate and doctoral candidate in the DFG project DIGILOG at the Chair of Political Science, Administration, and Organization at the University of Potsdam, where she has worked since August 2019. Her academic areas of interest focus on the digital transformation of public administration, street-level bureaucracy, comparative public administration and representative bureaucracy.

Justine Marienfeldt studied a Bachelor degree of Business Administration, Politics, and Administration at the University of Potsdam and the University of Warsaw in Poland. She then completed a Master degree in Administrative Science at the University of Potsdam and Ivane Javakhishvili State University of Tbilisi in Georgia. In addition to her studies, she worked at the Committee on Eastern European Economic Relations, the Department of Science for the Governing Mayor of Berlin (Senate Chancellery) and the German Centre for Higher Education Research and Science Studies.

Jakob Kühler is a research associate and doctoral student in the DFG project DIGILOG at the Chair of Public and Nonprofit Management. He is working on the internal dynamics of the digital transformation of public administration with a particular focus on the municipal level. His research interests include, in particular, the dynamics of planning and implementing digitization strategies. Jakob Kühler studied Public Governance across Borders at the University of Münster and the University of Twente in the Netherlands. He then completed a Master's degree in National and International Administration and Policy at the University of Potsdam. He gained professional experience during his studies by working as a research assistant at the Competence Center for Public IT at Fraunhofer FOKUS and the Konrad Adenauer Foundation in Berlin.

Jana Machljankin is a research associate and doctoral candidate at the ZHAW School of Management and Law Institute of Public Management and the University of Lausanne. Previously, she worked as a project manager at Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) GmbH and, most recently, as a consultant for the Decentralization Project in Ukraine. Her research interests include collaboration between the private and public sectors, focusing on digital transformation. In the DIGILOG project, she has a cross-sectional role. She is significantly involved in backstopping project management, and also contributes to research on the current state of digital transformation in Europe, and the development of new methodological concepts.

Jonathan Gerber works at the Institute of Applied Information Technology at the ZHAW School of Engineering, where he is a member of the Intelligent Information Systems research group and is involved as a doctoral student. Previously, Jonathan completed a Master's degree in Information and Communication Technologies at ZHAW and worked part-time in a data science startup, where he held a managerial role. He helped develop an algorithm that analyzes and predicts data and time series in the hospitality sector. Jonathan works in web crawling and data aggregation. His Ph.D. thesis is on efficient crawling and data analysis.

Jakob Marquardt has worked at the ZHAW School of Management and Law since 2022 and is a PhD student in the DIGILOG project. Previously, Jakob completed his Master's degree in Political and Administrative Sciences at the University of Konstanz, focusing on International Relations and European Integration. Jakob is mainly working on the quantitative parts of the research project. His Ph.D. thesis focuses on the impact of digital transformation on the performance level of local governments and its broader societal implications.

Jasmin Saxer is research assistant in the Intelligent Information System Group at the Zurich University of Applied Sciences in the Institute for Computer Science (InIT). Her research and project interests are in the fields of artificial intelligence, machine learning, and information retrieval. She obtained her Bachelor in Molecular Life Sciences with a cross-sectional qualification in digitalisation from the University of Applied Sciences and Arts Northwestern Switzerland. She obtained her Master in Applied Computational Life Sciences from Zurich University of Applied Sciences.

Bruno Kreiner holds a Bachelor of Science in Data Science from the University of Applied Sciences Northwestern Switzerland (FHNW). He is currently a part-time Master's student at the ZHAW School of Engineering and a part-time research assistant at the Institute of Informatics (InIT). Bruno has practical experience across the entire data science pipeline, from data collection and processing to visualization, with a focus on large language models.