It all starts with a simple question: why do some households recycle, and others don't? From 2010 to 2015, Ankinée Kirakozian devoted her PhD thesis to the economics of waste at Université Nice Sophia Antipolis — one of the first pieces of research to weave individual behaviour and public policy together so closely in this field.
The following five years were devoted to applied research: as a postdoctoral researcher at the CMA of MINES ParisTech, then at the CRISS laboratory of Université Polytechnique Hauts-de-France, she broadened her field of study to energy and mobility, always with the same method — understanding the determinants of behaviour before designing a public policy.
From 2019, she became independent to take on, alongside her academic research, one-off consulting assignments such as the Bureau of International Recycling, the European Commission's Joint Research Centre, Airparif, RATP, and others.
In 2020, she became a tenured Associate Professor at MINES Nancy (Université de Lorraine), within the BETA laboratory. There she taught general economics, environmental economics and public policy economics, continued ongoing projects and led new ones on waste, mobility, climate risk and hydrogen. It was also during these years that she chaired the Metropolitan Climate Committee of the Métropole du Grand Nancy (2022-2023).
In 2023, she chose to leave academia to devote herself fully to fieldwork: bringing research closer to action, and contributing more directly to the environmental decisions of local authorities, institutions and European projects.
In 2025, she joined the International Office for Water (OiEau) as a European project officer, responsible for the economic exploitation of research results on European water projects — InnWater, OPTAIN, AWARD, SOLUCIR. As an environmental economist, she brings her tools to these projects without being a water specialist herself: the technical and water expertise is provided by her colleagues; hers covers economic evaluation, results exploitation and impact measurement.
Today, she supports organisations that want to base their decisions on scientific evidence — with the conviction that research only has value when it improves a decision and produces a concrete impact.