Charlie Wilson is Professor of Energy and Climate Change at the Environmental Change Institute, School of Geography and the Environment, at the University of Oxford. He is also a visiting research scholar at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) in Austria. Prior to moving to Oxford in 2022, Charlie spent 11 years at the Tyndall Centre based in the School of Environmental Sciences at the University of East Anglia. During that time, Charlie was co-lead of the Tyndall research theme on Accelerating Social Transitions.
Charlie’s research interests lie at the intersection between innovation, people, and policy in the field of energy and climate change mitigation. He works both at a systems level on scenarios and modelling of net-zero transformations, and at a micro level on innovation processes, technology adoption, and pro-environmental behaviour. His research is supported by grants from the European Research Council (ERC), Horizon Europe, and the UK Research Councils.
Charlie has a PhD from the University of British Columbia (Canada) on the social and behavioural determinants of energy use. Prior to his PhD, he worked for a number of years in the private sector in both renewable energy and carbon finance, and climate change policy.
