Biography

Apoorva Vardhan is a third-year PhD student jointly affiliated with the Institute for Agricultural, Fisheries and Food Research (ILVO) and UCLouvain, Belgium. She holds a bachelor's degree in Plant Sciences from the University of Delhi and a master's degree in Sustainable Development from KU Leuven.

During her master's, she interned at the Belgian development agency Enabel, where she worked on modelling the impacts of climate change on tree growth in Rwanda. She also completed a short internship at WeForest in Brussels.

Her current research focuses on how agricultural policies can encourage farmers to adopt more sustainable practices. As part of the Horizon Europe project ENFASYS (Encouraging Farmers to Adopt More Sustainable Farming Systems through Policies and Business Strategies), she investigates which policy tools are most effective in stimulating farmers to reduce their pesticide use, using economic and behavioural experiments.

In her free time, Apoorva enjoys running and CrossFit.