Christian is a research group leader at the Department of Environmental Social Sciences (ESS) at the Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science & Technology (Eawag), an Associate Fellow at the Centre for Innovation Research (CIRCLE), Lund University, Sweden, and a guest lecturer at the Department of Geography (GIUZ) at the University of Zurich, Switzerland. Prior to joining Eawag, Christian has worked at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government (USA), Lund University (Sweden), UC Berkeley (USA), and Tsinghua University (China). 

His main research interests are centered on the geographies of innovation and sustainability transitions, the globalization of clean-tech innovation, as well as green industrial path development and leapfrogging dynamics in middle-income countries like China and India. By combining recent insights from transition studies, economic geography and institutional sociology, he aims to explore how multi-scalar actor networks and institutional arrangements influence the development and diffusion of clean-tech industries and sustainability transitions in key infrastructure sectors like energy, water, or transport. His work has been published in leading journals of innovation studies, economic geography and sustainability transition studies and he is managing a thematic group within the sustainability transitions research network (STRN) on the geography of sustainability transitions.