dr. M (Maura) Leusder

Biography

Maura Leusder is currently a postdoctoral researcher at Erasmus University Rotterdam. She defended her thesis, Accounting for the Start of Life, in 2025, graduating cum laude and receiving the prestigious Best PhD Thesis prize awarded by the Erasmus Graduate School. Prior to this, she completed her BSc and MSc (cum laude) at Rotterdam School of Management, including two honours programmes focused on grand challenges and sustainability. During her PhD, she also held visiting posts at the University of Innsbruck and the University of Melbourne.

Grounded in fieldwork, Maura studies how informal or soft cost and performance management systems are developed and used in healthcare organizations. Her research examines how such systems shape local routines, professional practices, and organizational outcomes. More broadly, her work explores calculative practices and the valuation of difficult-to-measure aspects of care and knowledge. She focusses on micro-level calculative practices and the ways in which numbers, traces, or accounts in and around information systems shape everyday organizational work and decision-making.

Her doctoral research focused on fertility care and higher education, where she studied the design and use of cost information systems in a clinic and laboratory setting, and the production of interdisciplinary knowledge. Her work spans both healthcare services research and theoretically driven research in accounting, organization, and management studies. Her current ongoing fieldwork is set in the context of cell and gene therapies.

Her research interests include cost and performance management, soft accounting systems, temporality in valuation practices, value-based healthcare, and AI-augmented decision-making in healthcare.

Maura has published in a variety of journals and presented at conferences, including Academy of Management (AOM), Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Accounting (IPA), European Academy of Management (EURAM), European Accounting Association (EAA) annual congress, European Accounting Review (EAR), ISPOR (US/Boston), INFORMS Healthcare, and the European Health Management Association (EHMA).