Kate Williamson joined SEI Oxford in October 2022 and is a Research Associate, focusing on climate change adaptation and developing an urban toolkit to promote learning opportunities for improving city health and wellbeing.

She has a master’s degree (MSc) in Climate Change: Environment, Science and Policy from King’s College London. Her MSc dissertation assessed the extent to which a climate change citizens’ assembly shaped climate policymaking at the local authority scale, using both interviews and document analysis. She has a bachelor’s degree in geography, with a year of international study at the University of British Columbia (Vancouver), from the University of Manchester. Her undergraduate thesis used focus groups and surveys to explore university student perceptions of carbon taxes and how these related to imagined low-carbon futures.

During her degrees, Kate undertook internship placements at the Environmental Change Institute at the University of Oxford, which provided an insight into the world of research, and at the environmental charity Ashden, where she supported learning opportunities in city-level climate action through their co-benefits toolkit. This inspired her to better understand the relationship between different types of knowledge and climate policy in her MSc work.