Professor, Dr Felix Creutzig

Felix Creutzig is head of the working group on Cities at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and Professor of Innovation and Policy Acceleration & Bennett Institute Chair at the University of Sussex. He is member of enterprise, public district, municipal and national climate advisory boards. Previously he had been visiting fellow at Princeton University, the University of California, Berkeley, and the China Energy Foundation in Bejing. He studied physics and medical studies and holds a PhD in computational neuroscience/machine learning. His groundbreaking research on climate change mitigation on urban scale has been recognized by the Piers Sellers Prize of the University of Leeds in 2017.

Felix Creutzig has led overarching, large-scale assessments of climate mitigation research for the IPCC and in publications, with a focus on cities, transport, lifestyles, and bioenergy. He served as a Convening Lead Author of the IPCC 6th Assessment Report, coordinating Chapter 5 of Working Group III on “Demand, Services and Social Aspects of Mitigation.” He co-leads efforts to connect the artificial intelligence/machine learning community with the climate change community (including a keynote at NeurIPS in 2019). He worked on implementing an Integrated Data Platform that synthesizes data from smart mobility to create a secure and shared data commons. He is also leading a crosscutting effort introducing digitalization and AI in the context of climate change mitigation, both as method and as governance dimension.  

Felix Creutzig was the first to typologize urban energy consumption at the global scale. His papers present key advances showing how urban economic relationships relate to climate mitigation measures in cities. His overall contributions to shaping the research field of urban climate change mitigation have been recognized by the Piers Sellers Prize. He has published 28 papers in high-ranking journals (Science, Nature, PNAS, Nature Climate Change, Nature Energy, Nature Cities, Nature Sustainability, Nature Food, Nature Geoscience). Overall, he has published 167 peer-reviewed journal articles, contributed to 15 chapters of assessment reports, and produced 3 books and 23 other reports or book chapters. A Google Scholar h-index of 87, i10-index of 166, and more than 43,000 citations (as of January 2025) place him among the top-cited researchers in his career cohort (listed as a highly cited researcher at Clarivate in 2022, 2023, and 2024). His work is regularly quoted in outlets such as the Guardian, Spiegel, the New York Times, The Hindu, and the EU’s Horizon journal. Spiegel featured his research in its print edition. He has also contributed op-eds to the Guardian, Tagesspiegel, Süddeutsche, Zeit, Handelsblatt, and other media outlets.