Professor Laura Diaz Anadon

Diaz Anadon Laura

Professor of Climate Change Policy , College Supervisor in Land Economy, Director of Studies in Land Economy, Director of Cambridge Centre for Environment, Energy and Natural Resource Governance
SpecialisationEnergy, Innovation, Climate Policy, Multiphase Flow and MRI.
Research interestsProf Laura Diaz Anadon holds the chaired Professorship of Climate Change Policy at the University of Cambridge. At Cambridge she is also Director of the Centre for Environment, Energy and Natural Resource Governance (CEENRG) and Fellow at St. John's College, where she is the Director of Studies for Land Economy. 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 is a Visiting Scholar for 2021–2022.

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 between July 2013 and September 2016. At HKS she held various posts, including Associate Director of the Science, Technology and Public Policy (STPP) program, Director of the Investigator of the Energy Technology Innovation Policy research group and Member of the Board of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs.

Prof Diaz Anadon is a Lead Author in the 6th Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Working Group III on Climate Change Mitigation. She is a member of the Economics of Decarbonization Advisory Group for the UK Treasury’s Net Zero Review, the Carbon Trust's Breakthrough Ideas Steering Group and the Cambridgeshire & Peterborough Independent Commission on Climate and the Board of Directors of Cambridge Enterprise Ltd. In June 2018 she was awarded the XVII Fundacion Banco Sabadell Prize for Economic Research for the best young Spanish economics researcher, and in 2021 she was awarded a Distinguished Visiting Professorship at Tsinghua University. In March 2022 she was selected as one of the 15 founding members of the European Scientific Advisory Board on Climate.

In addition to these various formal policy and commercialization advisory roles, Prof Diaz Anadon has engaged with policymakers in the United States, China, South Korea, the United Kingdom, and Spain among others, and contributed to the UN Global Sustainable Development report and the Global Energy Assessment. She has also worked as a consultant for various organizations (i.e., Climate Strategies on a World Bank project, UNFCCC, and OECD), and has given numerous international invited seminars and plenary talks. Before moving into her academic career, Prof Diaz Anadon also carried out process engineering research projects at DuPont and Bayer Pharmaceuticals, collaborated extensively with Johnson Matthey Catalysts, and worked as a financial consultant at Oliver Wyman for banks on credit risk models for financing technology projects.

Prof Diaz Anadon holds a PhD 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. During her undergraduate degree she also studied at the University of Stuttgart.