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

Dr Lili Jia leads Sustainable Innovation Lab at the Department of Engineering of the University of Cambridge. Previously, she held EPSRC and ESRC Fellowships. She holds a PhD in Economics, an M.Sc. in International Trade and a B.Sc. in Management. Lili’s research interest focuses on modelling sustainable behaviours and developing enabling technologies to facilitate sustainability transitions in the real-world. For example, her article on "Motivating actions to mitigate plastic pollution" was among the Top 50 Earth and Planetary Sciences Articles 2019 in Nature Communications. Her article in Harvard Business Review helped both food companies and policymakers understand how to improve the measure of sustainability in food industry systemically with digital traceability technologies. She serves on the Editorial Board of Scientific Reports. 

She has personally raised over £1.5mn of research funding. Her research results have generated tangible policy impacts. For example, they helped the Environment Agency officially commit to supporting industrial sustainability in its Regulatory Statement 2022. The SEEBEYOND project that she led has contributed to the development of UK’s Green Finance Strategy 2023 and the Department for Environment Food & Rural Affairs’ Food Data Transparency Partnership roadmap. 

Lili’s 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). 

Department role and responsibilities