Professor Lucie Middlemiss

Profile

I joined the School of Earth and Environment in 2004 as a Teaching and Research Fellow, and completed my PhD in the School in 2009. I became a Lecturer in Sustainability in 2009, and an Associate Professor in Sustainability in 2017. From September 2017 to August 2021 I was Co-director of the Sustainability Research Institute. I was promoted to professor in September 2021. Before I joined the school I did an MSc in Environmental Management at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam, and worked in publishing for 5 years.

Research interests

I wrote the first textbook on Sustainable Consumption (Routledge, 2018), and have research interests in sustainable consumption, energy poverty and participation in sustainable development. My research on energy poverty brings together qualitative insights into the lived experience (including the first paper to use this term in 2015), with critical policy analysis (notably a critique of English policy in this area in 2017). I am motivated by connecting deep understandings of energy consumption in daily life, with planning, measuring, monitoring and decision-making by policy-makers and practitioners. In more recent work, I led a team conducting secondary qualitative analysis of lived experience data (2019 and 2020), resulting in insights into the importance of social relations in energy consumption (see also 2020 in Nature Energy). I was also part of a team which produced a white paper on energy poverty for the Netherlands in 2020: translating state of the art academic thinking on this topic into concrete policy recommendations.

I supervise two PhD students: Lin Zhang and Irene Gonzalez Pijuan (based at Sheffield Hallam). I have also hosted students from Denmark and Brazil.

Previous students: Yael Arbell, Amy Ross, Harriet Thew, Imogen Rattle, David Wingate, Yana Manyukhina, Sarah Bradbury and Georgios Zampas.

• UKERC Whole Person Whole Place
• Understanding family and community vulnerabilities in transition to net zero
• WELLBASED

Student education

I contribute to the following modules:

• Sustainable Food Consumption (FOEV5103M)
• Change for Sustainable Development (SOEE3785)

I wrote Sustainable Consumption; Key Issues, released in 2018 published by Routledge/Taylor and Francis, (discount code is FLR40) an introductory textbook for students interested in consumption and environmental issues. I regularly supervise dissertations on sustainable consumption, sustainable communities and energy poverty topics.

Research groups and institutes

• Social and Political Dimensions of Sustainability
• Energy and Climate Change Mitigation
• Sustainability Research Institute
• Sustainable Food Systems