Research Associate in Cleantech & Industrial Policy in Europe (Fixed Term)

Applications are invited for two Research Associates in Cleantech & Industrial Policy in Europe to work on a research project, joint with UC Berkeley entitled "Designing Institutions for Commercialising Clean Energy Technologies", with a focus on public institutions for supporting the demonstration, commercialization, and early deployment of clean energy technologies in Europe, working under the supervision of Principal Investigator in Cambridge, Prof. Laura Diaz Anadon, https://www.landecon.cam.ac.uk/directory/professor-laura-diaz-anadon alongside other researchers at the Centre for Environment, Energy and Natural Resource Governance (CEENRG) https://www.landecon.cam.ac.uk/c-eenrg at the Department of Land Economy, University of Cambridge. They will also collaborate with the project co-Principal Investigator Prof. Jonas Meckling at the University of California Berkeley, and his team.

The Research Associates will work in CEENRG and its ecosystem in Cambridge (including the Conservation Research Institute) and beyond to shed light on the functions played by some of the understudied cleantech industrial policy instruments and their firm level commercialisation outcomes with a focus on Europe. Their research will involve gathering and analysing large amounts of new data using new computational techniques and data sources and will benefit from being in CEENRG, a major interdisciplinary research centre with a critical mass of researchers in this research area of cleantech, industrial policy and policy evaluation.

The project, funded by a donation of the Quadrature Climate Foundation (QCF), is motivated by the fact that emerging clean energy technologies must be commercialised at a much faster pace than their predecessors. This raises the question of how public institutions can most effectively facilitate the commercialisation of emerging clean energy technologies by supporting demonstration, manufacturing, and early deployment. While research has shown that government institutions contribute to innovation outcomes, most of this work, including our own, mainly focuses on R&D-focused agencies. In contrast, we know little about which institutions most effectively help commercialise new technologies to decarbonise energy systems. At the same time, in the recent turn towards green industrial policy, governments have created various institutions focused specifically on energy technology commercialisation. Policymakers are thus 'flying blind' by spending extensive effort on institution-building to address a grand challenge without knowing much about whether these institutions will be effective. This makes understanding effective institutional design an urgent and important research goal.

Researchers in the project will examine institutions focused on the commercialisation of clean energy technologies in the European Union, Germany, and the UK and the functions they perform in technology commercialisation. The project plans to study, both quantitatively and qualitatively, whether different institutions and specific institutional characteristics are associated with variation in the commercialisation of clean energy technologies. 

Researchers in Cambridge will focus primarily on the quantitative aspects of the project and successful candidates will need to demonstrate ability and experience with statistical and quantitative data analysis, particularly at the firm level, machine learning methods for analysing text and extracting and classifying material, and visualization methods.

Candidates should possess a PhD in a field relevant to the interface of energy technology, economics, data science and public policy.  Please see the further information document for full details of requirements for the posts. 

The University actively supports equality, diversity and inclusion and encourages applications from all sections of society. We particularly welcome applications from candidates from a BAME background for this vacancy as they are currently under-represented at this level in our Department.

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