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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, where she is also Director of the Centre for Environment, Energy and Natural Resource Governance (CEENRG), Fellow of St. John's College, Member of the Board of Directors of Cambridge Enterprise Ltd, and 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).
Professor Diaz Anadon is a Lead Author in the ongoing 7th Assessment Report (AR) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), contributing to Working Group III on Climate Change Mitigation—a role she also held during the 6th Assessment Report. In March 2026, she began her second term on the European Scientific Advisory Board on Climate Change (ESABCC) and was elected shortly after as Vice-Chair, having been a founding member and twice elected Vice-Chair during her first term. That same month, UK Ministers and the Devolved Governments appointed her to the UK Committee of Climate Change (CCC). She has previously served on the Economics of Decarbonization Advisory Group for the UK Treasury's Net Zero Review and on the Cambridgeshire & Peterborough Independent Commission on Climate.
Professor Diaz Anadon joined Cambridge's Department of Land Economy in September 2017, having spent the preceding year as a faculty member in the University's Department of Politics and International Studies. She previously served as an Assistant Professor of Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School from 2013 to 2016, where she also held posts including Associate Director of the Science, Technology and Public Policy (STPP) programme, Director of the Energy Technology Innovation Policy research group, and Member of the Board of the Belfer Center. She returned to Harvard as a Visiting Scholar in 2021–2022.
She has received numerous awards and recognition for her research, including being awarded the XVII Fundacion Banco Sabadell Prize for Economic Research for the best young Spanish economics researcher, a Distinguished Visiting Professorship at Tsinghua University, and a Senior Fellowship from the JM Keynes Fellowship Fund for her work on financial economics. She has also given numerous international invited seminars, plenary talks and keynotes.
In addition to her various formal policy and technology commercialization advisory roles, Professor 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 and various efforts at the International Energy Agency. She has also contributed evidence to US 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 starting her academic career, Prof. Diaz Anadon carried out process engineering research projects at DuPont and Bayer Pharmaceuticals, collaborated with Johnson Matthey Catalysts, and worked as a financial consultant at Oliver Wyman for banks on credit risk models for financing technology projects.
Professor Diaz Anadon holds a PhD from 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.