Funded Researchers

Headshot of Michael Hauer

Michael Hauser

  • Associate Professor, University of Natural Resource and Life Sciences, Vienna
  • Senior Research Associate, World Agroforestry, Nairobi
  • Research Affiliate, Abdul Latif Jameel Water & Food Systems Lab

Michael Hauser is an associate professor at Vienna's University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences. He specializes in farm and food system transitions in areas affected by climate change and conflict. Hauser is interested in the ecology of such complex systems and the institutional driver that influences their change. From 2017 to 2023, he was the principal scientist at the International Crops Research Institute for Semi-Arid Tropics. Before that, he served as Director at the Centre for Development Research in Vienna.

Michael has led and contributed to over 20 projects and studies in Africa, Asia, and Europe. He served on governing boards of science foundations, chaired the European Alliance on Agricultural Knowledge for Development, was visiting researcher at World Fish in Malaysia, and a guest professor at Thammasat University, Thailand.

In Vienna, Hauser teaches under- and postgraduate courses about navigating water, food, and climate system transformations in fragile contexts. He has published over 30 peer-reviewed articles, book chapters, and reports, and he served as a reviewer for journals such as Food Security, Journal of Arid Environments and Agroecology, and Sustainable Food Systems.

Hauser is a research affiliate at the Abdul Latif Jameel Water and Food Systems Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and a senior research associate at World Agroforestry, where he supports the Transformative Partnership Platform on Agroecology. He is based in Kenya, Nairobi.

J-WAFS-funded projects