Director
David Newbery CBE, FBA
Director of the Energy Policy Research Group (EPRG)
Emeritus Professor of Economics, Faculty of Economics, University of Cambridge
ScD (University of Cambridge)
Research projects
TSEC 1, CESSA
Research interests
Liberalisation, privatisation, competition and regulation in network industries, particularly electricity; transmission access pricing, electricity market reform, climate change policy.
Background
David Newbery CBE, FBA is the Director of the Cambridge Energy Policy Research Group, an Emeritus Professor of Economics at the Faculty of Economics, University of Cambridge, and a Professorial Research Associate in the UCL Bartlett School of Environment, Energy and Resources, University College London. He was educated at Cambridge with undergraduate degrees in Mathematics and Economics, and received a PhD and ScD in economics also from Cambridge. He is a Fellow of the British Academy and of the Econometric Society. He is Vice-Chairman of Cambridge Economic Policy Associates and has been an occasional consultant to the World Bank, Ofgem, Ofwat, and ORR, a former member of the Competition Commission, former chairman of the Dutch electricity Market Surveillance Committee and a former member of DECC’s Panel of Technical Experts on the Capacity Market. He is a member of Ofgem’s Gas Network Innovation Competition and an Independent Member of the Single Electricity Market Committee of the island of Ireland.
Research team
Assistant Directors
Michael Pollitt
Assistant Director, EPRG
Professor of Business Economics, Cambridge Judge Business School
DPhil (University of Oxford)
Research projects
Flexible Plug and Play Project (FPP), Autonomic Power Systems (APS)
Research interests
Regulation, privatisation and liberalisation in the network industries; cross national efficiency comparisons in the electricity industry; business ethics, social capital and corporate governance.
Background
Michael Pollitt is Professor of Business Economics, a Fellow of and Director of Studies in Economics and Management at Sidney Sussex College. He is also a Research Associate of the Centre for Business Research and a member of the Faculty of Economics.
Robert Ritz
Assistant Director, EPRG
Director of EPRG Energy Policy Forum; Senior Research Associate, Cambridge Judge Business School
DPhil (University of Oxford)
Research interests
Market-based environmental policy: especially permit allocations in cap-and-trade schemes, competitiveness impacts, carbon leakage, and international climate policy.
Industrial organisation of energy markets: especially natural gas markets, including international trade in liquefied natural gas (LNG), and pricing and competition in the electricity industry. Economics of corporate strategy: especially economics of cost pass-through, corporate diversification and investment decisions, and market performance when firms have market-share objectives.
Background
Robert Ritz is Assistant Director of the Energy Policy Research Group (EPRG) at the University of Cambridge, Senior Research Associate in Economics & Policy at Cambridge Judge Business School, and a Fellow in Economics at Peterhouse. He serves as a member of the Academic Panel at the UK’s Competition & Markets Authority (CMA) and Office of Gas & Electricity Markets (Ofgem). He also is on the Scientific Committee of the Chair of the Economics of Natural Gas at MINES ParisTech and is an External Faculty Affiliate of MIT’s Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research (CEEPR).
Robert holds a DPhil in Economics from Nuffield College, Oxford University, an MA in Financial Economics from the University of St Andrews, and attended the University of Pennsylvania and its Wharton School as a visiting McNeil Scholar. Before moving to Cambridge, he was a Career Development Fellow at St Hugh’s College, Oxford University and a Research Fellow with the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies. Earlier in his career, he worked on corporate strategy at McKinsey & Company and on financial stability at the Bank of England.
David Reiner
Assistant Director, EPRG
Professor of Technology Policy, Cambridge Judge Business School
PhD (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
Research projects
UK Carbon Capture and Storage Research Centre (UKCCSRC)
Research interests
Regulatory design in energy and environmental policy; public acceptability of energy technologies; social and political aspects of carbon dioxide capture and storage technologies; energy security and international climate change negotiations.
Background
Professor Reiner is a political scientist who works on questions of regulatory design and public acceptability. He is also a research associate of the Centre for the Study of the United States at the French Institute of International Relations.
Research Associates and Assistants
Zeynep Clulow
Research Associate, EPRG
PhD (University of Nottingham)
Peipei Chen
Research Assistant, EPRG
PhD (UCL)
Saheed Bello
Research Associate, EPRG
PhD (Loughborough University)
Associate Researchers
Ramit Debnath
Assistant Professor, Department of Computer Science and Technology, University of Cambridge
Cambridge Zero Fellow
PhD (University of Cambridge)
Research interests
Energy systems and governance; engineering for sustainable development; energy policy and poverty alleviation
Biography
Dr Ramit Debnath is a University Assistant Professor and the inaugural Cambridge Zero fellow at the University of Cambridge, as well as a visiting faculty associate in Computational Social Science at Caltech. Ramit leads the University’s Cambridge Collective Intelligence & Design Group.
Ramit’s overarching research objectives are to develop collective intelligence approaches using computational social science, machine learning and AI to provide a complex system-level understanding of barriers to climate action in the Anthropocene, their interactions, and how these translate to leverage points for policy and behavioural interventions. His research aims to incorporate the above data to design people-centric and just climate and sustainability action pathways. Ramit has a background in electrical engineering and computational social science, an MPhil-PhD from Cambridge as a Gates Scholar.
Simon Taylor
Management Practice Professor of Finance
PhD (University of London)
