17 Feb 2021

Welcome onboard Marcelo and Simone!

Team Blonk keeps expanding

The Blonk Team keeps expanding! Two new colleagues have joined us since the beginning of 2021. Marcelo is no stranger to our team, some years ago he worked as a scientific model developer. We are happy he rejoins us, this time in the role of Business Unit Manager of Blonk Sustainability Tools. Simone joins our team of consultants. It is with great pleasure that we introduce you to Marcelo and Simone.

Marcelo Tyszler

Business Unit Manager - Blonk Sustainability Tools


My passion is to translate complex problems into feasible solutions and applications. I enjoy combining my scientific, technical and management backgrounds to navigate the intersection where great people with great technical skills could use more scientific depth and understand the (business) decision space and where great applied scientists, policy makers and/or decision makers lack some of the technical skills to implement their ideas and plans.
I have experience and expertise in economic and mathematical modeling, optimization problems, machine learning and (econometric) analysis of small and large datasets as well as research and survey designs. I combine these more technical backgrounds with my experience leading projects and coordinating teams.

Throughout my career I always worked on society-relevant issues. I was born and raised in Brazil, where I studied and worked in management and economics focused on government and third-sector organizations, with a 6-month period at Harvard. In 2006 I moved to the Netherlands to pursue my PhD in Economics. After completion of my PhD I spend the last 9 years working in the applied science in the Agrofood sector, both from the environmental and socio-economic points of view.

I worked at Blonk back in 2012-2015 as a scientific model developer and from 2015-2020 as Monitoring, Evaluations and Learning expert at KIT Royal Tropical Institute, where I also served as Impact Team Coordinator for a couple of years.

Since January 2021 I am back at Blonk, as Business Unit Manager of the Blonk Sustainability Tools, a challenge I’m very happy to take! As a manager, I aim at enabling others to be their best, being supportive and inspiring.

Most of my free time is spent with my wife and 2 lovely kids, and I enjoy running, biking or walking in nature.

Simone Hesseling

Consultant Sustainability

Since a few weeks I have started working at Blonk Consultants. So far, I feel the content I work on is a great match to what I pursue in a job today and in life in general. In this message, I take the opportunity to introduce myself to you. Next to sharing previous experiences, I prefer to share my thoughts on my on-lasting journey towards a sustainable society.

My name is Simone, and I have been exploring many angles of what constitutes a global, sustainable society. I am educated as an industrial design engineer (University of Twente), which accounts for an education that encompasses technology, production and design.
During my studies I soon discovered, that for a society to evolve into new, sustainable forms, technology is only one of the ways to move forward. As I grew through my studies, I explored the realms of architectural, urban development (Budapest University of Technology and Economics); the extent to which biomimicry or biomimetics might provide solutions, and I performed research into the success of women in science, technology, engineering and mathematics. Understanding socio-psychological ingredients of an increasingly emancipated society might also open doors for understanding society’s growth towards sustainable behavior. At present, I have found solace in working on the topic of food and agriculture. Food is a necessity, however, not all types of food are as equally beneficial to humans as they are to a living planet. Before working at Blonk Consultants, with a team of independent thinkers, I recently developed the concept ‘Fate on a plate’, which is a platform that bridges the demands from consumers and food producers, with a focus on responsible and healthy consumption and production.

The way society handles the question of food will be the major factor for a sustainable society. I feel that the Blonk Consultants team is a group of great, kind, ambitious, forward-thinking people who are determined to tackle this challenge in the most prudent way. I am very happy to be a part of them.