Senior Research Associate in Incentivising Sustainability

Academic Division: Manufacturing and Management

Research group: Production Processes

Telephone: (7) 68210

Email: lj340@eng.cam.ac.uk

Research interests

Lili is a Senior Research Associate at the Department of Engineering of the University of Cambridge. Previously, she held EPSRC Knowledge Transfer, ESRC Innovation and ESRC Policy Fellowships. Her work builds on her previous research experience at the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), the University of Bonn’s Centre for Development Research (ZEF), and the Leibniz Institute of Agricultural Development in Central and Eastern Europe (IAMO). She holds a PhD in Economics, an M.Sc. in International Trade and a B.Sc. in Management.

Lili leads the Sustainable Innovation Lab at the Department of Engineering’s Centre for Industrial Sustainability. Her research interest focuses on motivating sustainable behaviours in the real-world with transdisciplinary and systems approaches. Her article on "Motivating actions to mitigate plastic pollution" was among the Top 50 Earth and Planetary Sciences Articles 2019 in Nature Communications. Please find more of her publications here. She serves on the Editorial Board of Scientific Reports.

The applications of her research include policy interventions, new product and service designs, motivating sustainability actions on the part of stakeholders and assisting businesses to integrate sustainability into their strategic plans. So far, she has helped companies and trade associations in the minerals, retailing, agriculture, food, water, chemicals and energy sectors to optimise their sustainability performance. She works with government bodies, such as the Environment Agency, Food Standards Agency and Department of Environment, Food & Rural Affairs in the UK, to explore schemes that can motivate individuals, industries and governments to move towards healthier and more sustainable society.

Department role and responsibilities