Professor Laura Diaz Anadon

at Department of Land Economy, University of Cambridge

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Professor of Climate Change Policy, Department of Land Economy, University of Cambridge

Professor Laura Diaz Anadon holds the chaired Professorship of Climate Change Policy at the University of Cambridge. At Cambridge she is also Director of CEENRG and Fellow at St. John’s College. She is also a long standing Affiliate at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at the Harvard Kennedy School (HKS) at Harvard University, where she was a Visiting Scholar in 2021-2022 and an Assistant Professor between 2013-2016.

She leads research on climate, energy and innovation policy, relying on economic, engineering and policy analysis methods to understand the drivers of innovation in the energy transition and the impact of different climate and energy policies on technological, social and economic outcomes.

Professor Diaz Anadon is a Lead Author in the 6th Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Working Group III on Mitigating Climate Change. She is also a member of the Cambridgeshire & Peterborough Independent Commission on Climate, the Economics of Decarbonization advisory group for the HMT Net Zero Review, and the Board of Directors of Cambridge Enterprise Ltd. In 2018 she was awarded the XVII Fundación Banco Sabadell Prize for Economic Research for the best young Spanish economics researcher. In 2021 she was honoured with a Distinguished Visiting Professorship from Tsinghua University and a Senior Keynes Fellowship from the JM Keynes Fellowship Fund. In March 2022 she was selected as member and elected as Vice-Chair of the European Scientific Advisory Board on Climate Change.

Prof. Diaz Anadon joined the Department of Land Economy in September 2017 after a year as a faculty member in the Department in Politics and International Studies, also at the University of Cambridge. Before Cambridge, she was an Assistant Professor of Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School (2013-2016). At HKS she held various posts, including Associate Director of the Science, Technology and Public Policy (STPP) program and Co-Principal Investigator of the Energy Technology Innovation Policy research group.

Prof. Diaz Anadon has engaged with policy makers in the United States, China, South Korea, the United Kingdom, and Spain among others. She also contributed to the UN Global Sustainable Development report and the Global Energy Assessment. She was on the advisory board of the project on "Accelerating Energy Innovation" at the International Energy Agency, has worked as a consultant for various organisations (i.e., Climate Strategies on a World Bank project, UNFCCC, and OECD), and has given numerous international invited seminars and plenary talks.

Prof. Diaz Anadon’s work on climate, energy, and innovation policy and systems analysis has resulted in over 70 journal articles (including Nature, PNAS, Nature Energy, Research Policy, Nature Climate Change, Environmental Science & Technology, Risk Analysis, Climatic Change, Environmental Research Letters, and Energy Economics), and other publications, including many book chapters, policy briefs and a 2014 edited Cambridge University Press book entitled “Transforming U.S. Energy Innovation”.

Over the past five years she has been awarded many competitive collaborative research grants including: two EU-funded Horizon projects (INNOPATHS and PRISMA); an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation grant to work on energy technology spillovers and the role of policy; a UK ESRC and US NSF grant to work on the role of manufacturing location on the direction of innovation; a UK BEIS and CIFF project (EEIST) focussed on developing complexity-based modelling solutions to inform policy making to meet climate goals in the energy sector (EEIST); and a NERC grant to work on landscape solutions to promote climate mitigation, biodiversity and local development.

Prof. Diaz Anadon holds a Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from the Magnetic Resonance and Catalysis Group at the University of Cambridge, a Masters in Public Policy from the Harvard Kennedy School, and a Masters in Chemical Engineering from the University of Manchester, including a Diplomarbeit at the University of Stuttgart. She also done research at DuPont, Bayer Pharmaceuticals, and Johnson Matthey Catalysts, and worked as a financial consultant at Oliver Wyman for banks on credit risk models. She has received various awards and scholarships, including from the US-UK Fulbright Commission and the Fundación Caja Madrid.