Senior Research Associate in Incentivising Sustainability

Academic Division: Manufacturing and Management

Research group: Production Processes

Telephone: (7) 68210

Email: lj340@cam.ac.uk

Research interests

Dr Lili Jia leads Sustainable Innovation Lab at the University of Cambridge. She holds a PhD in Economics, an M.Sc. in International Trade and a B.Sc. in Management. Her research interest focuses on modelling sustainable behaviours and developing enabling technologies to facilitate sustainability transitions in real-world. 

Lili has published 20 transdisciplinary articles and high-impact policy reports. 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. Her research findings have helped the Environment Agency officially commit to supporting industrial sustainability in its Regulatory Statement 2022. The SEEBEYOND project that she led was included in the UK’s Green Finance Strategy 2023 and the Department for Environment Food & Rural Affairs’ Food Data Transparency Partnership roadmap. 

Lili has raised over £1.5mn of research funding, such as EPSRC and ESRC Fellowships. She serves on the Editorial Board of Scientific Reports. 

Previously, Lili worked 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