Academic and Research Staff

Professor Leonard Smith 

Director of CATS

Professor in the Department of Statistics

Further details: Homepage Publications

Contact details: Tower 1, 11.01A, +44 (0) 20 7955 7626, Email

Professor Pauline Barrieu

Co-Director of CATS

Professor in the Department of Statistics

Her research interests include: Illiquid and incomplete financial markets; Real options; Contract designing; Environmental economics; Risk measures.

Further details: Homepage

Contact details: Room Col6.03, +44 (0) 20 7955 6016, Email

Professor Roman Frigg

Co-Director of CATS

Professor in Philosophy in the Department of Philosophy, Logic and Scientific Method, and Deputy Director of the Centre for Philosophy of Natural and Social Science (CPNSS)

His research addresses issues in both general philosophy of science and philosophy of physics.

Further details: Homepage

Contact details: Room T501A, +44 (0) 20 7955 7182, Email

Dr David Stainforth

Co-Director of CATS

Principal Research Fellow in the Grantham Research Institute.

He is a physicist by training and has many years experience of climate modelling. While a researcher at Oxford University he co-founded and was chief scientist of the climateprediction.net project, the world's largest climate modelling experiment.  He has been both a NERC Research Fellow and a Tyndall Research Fellow at Oxford University. His current research interests focus on how we can extract robust and useful information about future climate, and climate related phenomena, from modelling experiments. This includes issues of how to design climate modelling experiments and how to link climate science to real-world decision making in such a way as to be of value to industry, policy makers and wider society.

Further details: Homepage

Contact details: Tower 1,11.01D, +44 (0) 20 7106 7622, Email   

Professor Henry Wynn

Chair of CATS

Professor of Statistics at LSE. He was Convenor (Head) of the department from 2003-2006. He leads a research group: the Decision Support and Risk Group, well supported by research grants, particularly from the EU. He was (2000-2005) part-time Scientific Co-Director of EURANDOM, the international stochastics institute attached to Eindhoven Technical University (TUE), in the Netherlands. He was appointed chair of the Scientific Board of the Norwegian statistical research centre, Statistics for Innovation (sfi)2 in 2007. He is Principal Investigator at LSE on the EU-funded CELSIUS project.

Further details: Homepage

Contact details: Tower 1, 11.01E, +44 (0) 20 7955 6116, Email

Dr Hailiang Du

Research Officer in CATS

He worked on the Munich Re programme 'Evaluating the economics of climate risks and opportunities in the insurance sector'. 

His main research was on data assimilation and parameter estimation for deterministic nonlinear systems. He was also involved in the ENSEMBLES project and focused on evaluating and combining multi seasonal model outputs. He is currently working on real time series forecasting and interpreting model output for decision maker. His research interests are nonlinear time series analysis, parameter estimation, forecast interpretation.

He is currently on secondment to the RDCEP, University of Chicago.

Further details: Homepage

Contact details: Email

Dr Ofer Engel

Research Officer in CATS 

He is currently working on the CELSIUS project where he is studying facilitators and barriers for large scale district heating and cooling projects in urban settings. He is interested in Social Network Analysis, Social Mechanisms, Democratic Processes, Technology in Organizations and Organization theories. He completed his PhD in Information Systems and Organizations under Carsten Sørensen and Peter Abell at LSE before joining CATS in 2013.

Contact details: Tower 1, 11.01C, Email

Dr Ralph Rayner

Professorial Research Fellow with CATS 

Further details: Homepage

Contact details: Email

Dr Erica Thompson

Research Officer in CATS

Her research interests focus on how to identify meaningful and useful projections of future climate, how different types of model output can be used to inform these projections, and how to think about uncertainty.  She looked at some of these questions in the context of North Atlantic storms for her PhD at Imperial College.  Her background is in the physical sciences, having studied physics and mathematics at Cambridge University.  Erica has also worked for the UK Energy Research Centre on an assessment of global oil depletion and for the Grantham Institute at Imperial College as a research assistant in climate policy; she is also interested in climate and energy policy and the role of scientific advice in policy-making.

Further details: Homepage

Contact details: Email 

Edward Wheatcroft

Research Officer in CATS

Ed is working on the EU Horizon 2020 funded project 'Improving Future Ecosystems Benefits through Earth Observations' (ECOPOTENTIAL).  He did his PhD in CATS, starting in October 2010, as part of the RAPID-RAPIT project, a collaborative project led by the National Oceanographic Centre, Southampton. In his thesis, he presented a variety of new techniques capable of improving the performance of probabilistic forecasts formed using output from imperfect models of nonlinear systems. This included a novel approach in which improved skill is obtained by combining forecasts of the same target launched at different points in time. During his PhD studies, Ed spent six months working on a NERC funded joint project with the Royal National Lifeboat Institution aimed at giving lifeboat crew better weather information in advance of and during rescue operations.

Contact details: Tower 1, 11.01, +44 (0) 20 7955 6326, Email