Profile
Charlie is a Professor of Energy and Climate Change and Senior Research Fellow in the Environmental Change Institute (ECI) at the University of Oxford. He is also a visiting research scholar at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) in Austria.
Charlie’s research is at the intersection between innovation, people, and policy in the context of energy and climate change. He analyses the drivers and dynamics of energy transitions, both historically and into the future using scenarios and modelling. He is also interested in micro-scale processes of low-carbon innovation, technology adoption, and pro-environmental behaviour. His research is supported by grants from the European Research Council (ERC), Horizon Europe, and the UK Research Councils.
He currently leads the iDODDLE project on the digitalisation of daily life and its impacts on energy use and greenhouse gas emissions, combining work from local to global scales. He also leads the Oxford teams in European consortia including the PRISMA project on capturing digitalisation and low-carbon lifestyles in policy analysis of energy transitions; and the CIRCEULAR project on digitalisation as an enabler of circular economy and net-zero goals. Across all these projects, Charlie’s research seeks to understand how to accelerate progress towards a zero-carbon energy system with people at its heart.
Charlie is also an active member of several international networks including EDITS on energy demand innovations, and RCN-DEE on the digital economy.
Recently completed projects that Charlie led or was involved with include: SILCI on disruptive low-carbon innovations, EnergyREV on smart local energy systems, the CAST centre on climate change and social transformation, NAVIGATE on the behavioural realism of net-zero pathways, and GECKO for training PhDs on smart energy.
Charlie gives public lectures and talks on his research, some of which are online including one at the Oxford Martin School on digitalisation and climate change. He also posts research updates on LinkedIn.
Prior to joining the ECI at Oxford, Charlie spent 11 years with the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research at the University of East Anglia (UK). He holds a PhD from the University of British Columbia (Canada) on the social and behavioural determinants of energy use. Before his PhD, he worked for a number of years in the private sector in both renewable energy and carbon finance.
For a full list of Charlie's publications, please go to his Google Scholar or ORCiD pages.