Research Team

Research manager
Liu Si: A young Chinese national from Beijing who is currently pursuing his Master study of Leisure Tourism and Environment in Wageningen University of the Netherlands will become Eclipse-City's first research manager in 2008 for our Eclipse Motives and Satisfaction project. Liu Si's research will focus on learning more about how eclipse visitors' social and demographic background can influence different motives to visit an eclipse event and how these motives affect their after evaluation. An on-site questionary was conducted on 1st August, 2008 during the total solar eclipse event in the Eclipse-City's day camp in the middle of the Gobi Desert. The further results of the research will be analyzed by SPSS function. The final report will be written in English and published on EC Research Center's Website in February 2009.
(si.liu@eclipse-city.com)

Research supervisor
Maarten Jacobs is Assistant Professor at the Socio-spatial Analysis Chair Group of Wageningen University. His academic interests include perceptions of landscape, nature and water, human-animal relations, and leisure and tourist experiences. He is keen to connect these domains of applied research with psychology (emotion and perception theory), neuroscience (the neural constitution of psychological functions) and philosophy of mind (the mind-body problem), as his Ph-thesis, the Production of Mindscapes (2006), demonstrates. Maarten Jacobs is a member of the Dutch Council for Environmental, Nature and Spatial research, and a guest professor at Colorado State University (US) and Bergen University (Norway).
(maarten.jacobs@wur.nl)

Research Assistant
Lu Chen, a third year undergraduate student of event management from Shanghai Institute of Foreign Trade and FH Osnabruek, Germany. Lu Chen joins Eclipse-City as a summer intern in 2008 to assistant Liu Si's research project as Eclipse Motives and Satisfaction. Lu Chen's work will focus on designing the questionnaire in both English and Chinese language, and also the on-site data collection and analysis.