Laura Diaz Anadon

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 of St. John's College, where she is the Director of Studies for Land Economy. She is also a Board Member of the University of Cambridge Conservation Research Institute (UCCRI). 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 for 2021–2022.

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.

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 Cambridgeshire & Peterborough Independent Commission on Climate and the Board of Directors of Cambridge Enterprise Ltd. In March 2022 she was selected as one of the 15 founding members of the European Scientific Advisory Board on Climate. She was later voted as Vice-Chair of the Board.

She has received numerous awards and recognition for her research. 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. She has given numerous international invited seminars, plenary talks and keynotes.

In addition to her various formal policy and commercialization advisory roles, 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 contributed evidence to U.S. Congress and the UK Parliament. She has also worked as a consultant for various organizations (i.e., Climate Strategies on a World Bank project, UNFCCC, and OECD), Before Prior to starting her academic career, Diaz Anadon 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.

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.