Lucie Middlemiss

Prof. Lucie Middlemiss is Professor of Environment and Society in the Sustainability Research Institute, at the University of Leeds in the UK. She wrote the first textbook on Sustainable Consumption (Routledge, 2018), and has research interests in sustainable consumption, energy poverty and participation in sustainable development. Her 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). She is 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, she has 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). She 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. She is currently working on three projects: Wellbased, a EU project on health and energy poverty, Whole Person Whole Place, looking at the role of social relations in energy renovation, and Understanding Family and Community vulnerability in the transition to Net Zero.