Charlotte Tienes supports the Urban Studies Working Group as a research assistant in the international EU Horizon-Europe project ZOE (Zoonosis Emergence - across Degraded and Restored Forest Ecosystems). She is working on the question of what behavioral, social and cultural links exist between the loss of forest ecosystems, the associated loss of biodiversity and the emergence of zoonoses, i.e. diseases that are transmitted from animals to humans. She draws on her specialization in the field of environmental psychology during her master's degree and her experience in 2023 with an NGO in indigenous areas in the Brazilian South Amazon region.

Her Bachelor's degree in Work- and Organizational Psychology was followed by a Master's degree in Cognitive Neuroscience, Psychology and Philosophy at Humboldt University & Charité Berlin. During her semesters abroad in Madrid, Sofia and Vienna, she repeatedly worked in interdisciplinary fields. Her research focus is on human-environment interactions and especially factors influencing environmentally conscious or environmentally harmful behavior, which she also wrote her master's thesis on (conceptual approach to the attitude-behaviour gap and the influence of entitlement on environmentally harmful behavior).