Katja Biedenkopf is an Associate Professor at Leuven International and European Studies (LINES), KU Leuven. Her academic research focuses on the external effects of European Union environmental and climate policy; climate and environmental policy in the United States of America, China, South Korea, Japan and South Africa; and climate diplomacy. She particularly zooms in on carbon pricing, chemicals, electronic waste and climate policy. Processes of policy learning, leadership, pioneership and policy diffusion are central to her research.
Katja Biedenkopf teaches courses on EU policy-making; European climate, energy and environmental policy; global environmental politics; global politics and diplomacy; and research methods. She is a convinced proponent of interactive teaching methods, in particular simulations and case studies. She chairs the working group on international relations of the Belgian Federal Council for Sustainable Development (FRDO/CFDD) and is a member of the KU Leuven Sustainability Council, the co-chair of the Diversity and Sustainability Committee of the Faculty of Social Sciences, KU Leuven and the vice-leader of the working group on Contestation of the COST Action EU Foreign Policy Facing New Realities (ENTER). Katja Biedenkopf also is a Senior Associate Research Fellow at the Institute for European Studies, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium and a member of the research group on Norms and Change in World Politics at the Justus-Liebig Universität Gießen, Germany. Previously, Katja Biedenkopf worked as an Assistant Professor at the University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
In 2011-2012, she was a postdoctoral research fellow at the KFG ‘The Transformative Power of Europe’ at Free University Berlin, Germany; and in 2007-2011, she was a research fellow at the Institute for European Studies at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel. In 2016, she held a six-months visiting fellowship at Johns Hopkins University in Washington, DC, United States and, in 2010, a six-months Fulbright Schuman fellowship at the University of California at Berkeley, United States. Katja Biedenkopf studied political science and European public administration at the College of Europe in Bruges, Belgium, the Justus-Liebig-Universität Gießen, Germany, the University of Technology Sydney, Australia and the Université Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium.