Members

Co-directors

Luca Taschini, Centre Director

Luca is an economist with expertise in applied microeconomics, environmental economics, and financial economics. He is Professor of Climate Change Finance at the University of Edinburgh, a Visiting Senior Fellow at the Grantham Research Institute at the London School of Economics, and a Fellow at CESifo Energy and Climate Economics, Munich.

Theodor Cojoianu, Co-director of Research Development

Theodor is a Senior Lecturer in Sustainable Finance. His work is at the intersection between sustainability, data science and finance is focused on applying innovative research methods to the study of sustainable development issues. His work has led him to be invited as a Member of the European Commission's Platform on Sustainable Finance, where he advises the Commission on EU sustainable finance policy and on HM Treasury's Green Technical Advisory Group.

Mengfei Jiang, Co-director of Research Development

Mengfei is a Lecturer in Finance at the University of Edinburgh Business School. Her experience includes research roles at the University of Edinburgh and Heriot-Watt University. Mengfei's interdisciplinary research spans carbon pricing, climate change policies, low-carbon project financing, and the integration of climate change mitigation into corporate strategy. She has also consulted on World Bank Group-funded projects related to carbon markets and energy-efficient solutions.

Members

Kristina Auxtova

Kristina is a Lecturer in Marketing at University of Edinburgh Business School, specialising in questions of ethics and sustainability in advertising and consumption, particularly within the public and non-profit contexts. Her current work within the sustainability domain focuses on second-hand consumption and the role of charity shops in the circular economy.

Elizabeth Bomberg

Elizabeth is Professor of Environmental Politics at the University of Edinburgh with particular expertise in comparative environmental policymaking, climate mobilisation and multilevel governance. She holds advisory posts at the University College Dublin Earth Institute and serves as Sustainability lead for the University’s UNA Europe1 project. She is an award-winning teacher in the area of sustainability and environmental policy.

Matthew Brander

Matthew is a Senior Lecturer in Carbon Accounting with expertise in corporate-level GHG accounting, product life cycle assessment, project, and policy-level accounting. He has a particular interest in consequential forms of accounting for assessing the system-wide change in emissions caused by projects, policies, and other forms of intervention.

Raffaella Calabrese

Raffaella is a statistician with expertise in credit risk modelling, Fintech, Open Banking, climate stress testing and access to finance for small businesses. She is Professor of Statistics and Finance at the University of Edinburgh.

Miguel de Carvalho

Miguel de Carvalho is a Reader in Statistics at the School of Mathematics, University of Edinburgh. His research interests are diverse, spanning applied statistics, biostatistics, econometrics, risk analysis, and statistics of extreme events. Miguel is the former Director of the University of Edinburgh Centre for Statistics and current Co-Director of the Edinburgh Centre of Financial Innovation.

Lucia Cervi

Lucia is an interdisciplinary academic with a background in political science, human rights, and Corporate Social Responsibility. She is broadly interested in the social aspect of sustainability, from a critical and qualitative perspective. Her current research focuses on the ethical implications of digitalisation, the digital vulnerabilities emerging from FinTech, and the socio-political implications of Big Tech practices.

Adam Chalmers

Adam is a Senior Lecturer in Politics and International Relations at the University of Edinburgh and a Senior Visiting Research Fellow at King's College London. His areas of expertise includes corporate sustainability policy, corporate lobbying, and natural language processing. He is the co-academic lead of Carrots & Sticks, a large-scale database and repository of Corporate Sustainability Policy.

Ian Cochran

Ian is Programme Director on the MSc Climate Change Finance and Investment and a Lecturer in Climate Finance & Investment. He has worked in the area of climate and investment policy for close to 15 years in think tank and more recently academic settings. His expertise includes instruments and modalities of public climate investment; blended finance; sectoral policy frameworks; energy efficiency investment and finance; and Paris Alignment / Net Zero approaches.

Gbenga Ibikunle

Gbenga is a Professor and Chair of Finance at the University of Edinburgh, and as the Director of the Edinburgh Centre for Financial Innovations, he leads on strategic FinTech and Financial Services initiatives at the University. He is Director of the NatWest Group-funded Centre for Purpose-Driven Innovation in Banking, a Fellow at the RoZetta Institute in Sydney, Australia, Member of the Bank of England and HM Treasury’s CBDC Academic Advisory Group, and a Council Member of the World Economic Forum’s Global Future Council on the Future of Resilient Financial Systems.

Owen Kelly

Owen became an academic after a career in government and business. He is Director of Engagement and Internationalisation at the Business School and he leads the internationalisation work at the Edinburgh Futures Institute. He holds a PhD in philosophy as well as degrees in Social Policy and in Chinese. He is an Honorary Fellow of the Chartered Banker Institute and his work for charities and the finance industry was recognised under the UK’s honours system in 2016.

Winston Kwon

Winston Kwon is a Senior Lecturer in Strategy and Social Innovation with expertise in systems thinking and design, approaches for sustainable governance and managing civil society organizations for environmental and social impact.

Ishbel McWha-Hermann

Ishbel is a work psychologist and Senior Lecturer in International Human Resource Management. Her research focusses on social justice at work, with a particular focus on fairness, decent work and sustainability. She is interested in the role of organisations in addressing poverty and inequality, and how organisational policies and practices can impact wellbeing and quality of life for workers, their families, organisations and society. Ishbel is Director of Project Fair, focused on fair reward in international NGOs.

Agnessa Spanellis

Agnessa is a Senior Lecturer in Systems Thinking with expertise in gamification applications in the context of sustainability. She is a director of a Gamification and Systems Thinking lab. She is particularly interested in how gamification can enable knowledge to cross boundaries, e.g., cultural, domain or social boundaries, to support decision making, and how gamification can help us to understand complexity in systems.

Angela Tregear

Angela is Professor of Marketing at University of Edinburgh Business School, specialising in sustainability in agrifood systems and supply chains, and the rural environment. As an applied social scientist, her work explores the behaviours of institutions, organisations and individuals and the consequences for sustainability outcomes. She also provides carbon accounting services for public catering bodies.

PhD students

Visiting Fellows

Leonardo Bortolan

Leonardo Bortolan earned his PhD in Statistics from the University of Bologna and currently serves as a senior economist at Prometeia. In his role, he specialises in modelling and forecasting financial time series, particularly focusing on interest rates. His expertise extends to examining the behaviour of these rates under various climate scenarios. His research interests encompass the accurate assessment of climate risk drivers, both physical and transitional, and their impact on various financial instruments.

Charlotte Challis

Charlotte is a passionate advocate for the power of Internal Carbon Pricing to drive change and prepare organisations for a carbon constrained future. She is an engineer who, since 2005, has worked on decarbonisation, systems, and now on Internal Carbon Pricing. Charlotte is the lead for Internal Carbon Pricing within the global sustainability consultancy Anthesis. Her experience includes: internal carbon pricing, climate risk, process and energy mapping in manufacturing, Life Cycle Assessment, GHG reporting, process optimization in food & drink, and decision support in process control.

Claudia Melim-McLeod

Claudia is a practitioner with over 20 years’ experience in governance, climate, natural resource management and sustainable finance. She is the Director of Future Horizons Institute in Norway and her research interests include the impact of global agricultural and mineral commodity value chains on biodiversity, nature-related financial risk management, and the development of sustainable finance in China.

Corinna Olearo

Corinna Olearo works at Nestlé, where she leads the team responsible for market analysis and price risk management of commodities. Since 2008, she has been involved in studying the market and price dynamics of agricultural commodities and managing price risk through the use of financial derivatives. Additionally, Corinna actively participates in projects that assess the impact of climate change and ESG regulations on raw materials as well as on the end-to-end supply chain of large multinational companies. She graduated in 2003 with a degree in Political Economy from the University of Rome La Sapienza and obtained a Master's degree in European Economics from the College of Europe in Bruges.

Lorenzo Prosperi

Lorenzo Prosperi earned his PhD in Economics from the Toulouse School of Economics in 2019 and LUISS University in 2015. He is currently a Principal Economist at Prometeia, where he oversees multiple research projects in the areas of financial markets, banking, asset allocation, ESG and climate change. His research focuses on climate scenarios for firms and sovereigns, as well as the pricing of transition and physical risks in asset prices. During his PhD, he explored the effects of political frictions on government borrowing decisions and analyzed the macroeconomic implications of macroprudential regulation on sovereign debt.

Gian Luca Vriz

Gian Luca is currently pursuing a PhD in statistics at the University of Padova and is actively involved in a project at the Prometeia s.p.a. focusing on Climate Stress Testing and scenario analysis. His research spans applied econometrics and statistics. He has been awarded a scholarship from the Italian "Programma Operativo Nazionale" (PON) for research in climate finance. By examining physical, transition, and liability risks, his goal is to gain a profound understanding of the interactions among the economic system, financial stability, and climate change.

Claire Zheng

Claire is an ESG Associate Director at Cardano, advising multi-billion pension fund trustees on covenant exposure to climate change, as well as helping private equity houses integrate ESG-related value creation strategies on fund and portfolio company level. Claire also took on the stewardship role for Cardano Sustainable Investment on a number of industry decarbonisation working groups, directly engaging with companies to advance corporate sustainability objectives. Claire has past experience in climate risk at Citi Group and Barclays where she helped both banks establish climate risk framework and build climate stress test modelling from scratch.

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