Julian holds a B.Sc. in Agricultural Sciences and a M.Sc. in Agricultural Sciences in the Tropics and Subtropics from the University of Hohenheim. During his masters, he focused on rural development policies and institutions, and natural resource use. Using the Sustainable Livelihoods Framework, his master thesis research was on land conflicts and forced displacement in the context of infrastructure development in Cambodia. In 2018 he attended a DAAD funded excursion ‘Land Use Systems of Peru- Sustainability and Socio-Economic Dynamics under Global Change’ in Peru.

His current PhD research focuses on infrastructure development and its impact on local resource nexuses in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. For his research, he combines three main concepts. These are critical institutionalist theories on natural resource governance, concepts on infrastructure and the WEF nexus. Julian is supervised by Jeremy Allouche and Shilpi Srivastava in the Resource Politics and Environmental Change Cluster.

He has also worked on a number of projects as a research assistant, currently on a project on The effects of COVID-19 policy and programming responses on child labour in agri-food systems: A global review.