Lara Spaans is a postdoctoral researcher of sustainable finance at the University of Amsterdam and is collaborating with Prof. Paul Smeets and Prof. Aleksandar Andonov.  She is specifically interested in the portfolio decisions of large institutional investors concerning climate and sustainability factors.  For her PhD she examined mutual funds' reliance on backward- and forward-looking sustainability information signals. Lara's other academic interests are local economic effects resulting from biodiversity losses, and questions related to strategic cooperation within mutual fund families.