Visiting academics

Mehmet Murat Çobanoğlu is a Visiting PhD Researcher at the EPRG, University of Cambridge, and a PhD candidate in Economics at Middle East Technical University (METU). His research focuses on climate-related risks, sovereign debt dynamics, and macro-financial stability, with particular interest in climate finance and fiscal resilience. His doctoral research is supported by TÜBİTAK, and he is a researcher in the Horizon Europe MSCA-funded Finance4Green project. Murat has nearly 20 years of experience at Türkiye’s Ministry of Treasury and Finance, specialising in sovereign debt management, debt issuance, and public financing strategy. He has also worked with the World Bank on capital market and infrastructure finance.

Yixu is a Visiting PhD Researcher at the EPRG (University of Cambridge) and a PhD candidate in the Department of Earth System Science at Tsinghua University. Her research focuses on the impacts of climate change and extreme weather on energy infrastructure and power system reliability. She develops global facility-level datasets and integrates climate, hydrological, engineering, geospatial and socioeconomic data to quantify climate risks and evaluate adaptation strategies. Her current work examines the impacts of heatwaves and prolonged droughts on thermal and hydropower generation. She is extending this research to compound climate extremes, coordinated responses across wind, solar, hydro and thermal power, and the resilience of AI data centres. She holds a BSc in Geographical Science from East China Normal University.

Yang is a PhD student at the Beijing Institute of Technology and a visiting PhD researcher at EPRG (University of Cambridge). Her research focuses on policy evaluation and policy modelling for low-carbon transitions, particularly carbon dioxide removal (CDR), CCUS, and energy-economic-technological systems. Her previous research developed a nested, multi-scale framework for CCUS policy design in China’s coal-fired power sector, combining real options modelling, learning curves and optimisation to identify cost-effective deployment pathways. She also developed an AI-enhanced causal inference framework to assess when and under what conditions climate policies trigger low-carbon innovation take-offs across technologies and national contexts. Her future research topic focuses on policy modelling for the feasible deployment of carbon dioxide removal under real-world constraints.