Francisco Santos is a PhD candidate at the Department of Spatial Economics of Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam in the Netherlands. He started his PhD in September 2026 through the Collaborative Doctoral Partnership (CDP) programme of the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre (JRC). His doctoral research is carried out jointly by VU Amsterdam and the JRC and is partly funded by the LIFE CO-ACT project.
Francisco holds a degree in Spatial Planning and a Master’s degree in Geographic Information Systems and Territorial Modelling Applied to Spatial Planning, both from the University of Lisbon. His academic work focused on territorial change, with particular interests in land-use change, regional disparities and agricultural dynamics. Before starting his PhD, he worked as a Scientific Trainee in GIS at the JRC in Ispra, Italy, where he developed EU-scale data workflows integrating large environmental and agricultural datasets to support policy-relevant research.
