Prof Anable’s research addresses the potential for demand-side solutions to reduce carbon and energy from transport; her intellectual interests span the social sciences. She joined ITS from the Centre for Transport Research at the University of Aberdeen.
Having completed her joint honours degree in Geography and European studies and an MSc in Urban Planning, she undertook an ESRC PhD Studentship at Imperial College (Centre for Environmental Technology). Her doctoral work applied social psychological theories and market segmentation techniques to assess the potential to influence patterns of leisure travel. She is now an expert in travel behaviour, car ownership and vehicle choice and the implications of these on the energy system. This includes the evaluation of policy interventions at local and national scales designed to influence private and business travel behaviour involving the design, management and analysis of large mixed methods studies involving primary and secondary datasets. The latter has had particular impact on scientific and policy thinking related to ‘Smarter Choice’ (or ‘soft’) interventions with evaluation work including Scotland’s Smarter Choices, Smarter Places Programme, the Energy Technology Institute’s Plug-in Vehicles and Infrastructure Consumer project and a large segmentation study across six European cities to understand the impact of this approach on the design and effectiveness of mobility management strategies.
She has authored or co-authored over 50 academic peer-reviewed journal articles and research reports with projects mainly funded by UK Research Councils, the Energy Technologies Institute, the UK Department for Transport, Scottish Government and the European Union. Recent work has been aligned with EPSRC’s emphasis on interdisciplinary research addressing end use energy demand including PI of Motoring and Car Ownership Trends in the UK (‘MOT’) and Co-I of Dynamics of Energy, Mobility and Demand (‘DEMAND’), the UK Energy Research Centre (UKERC) and Disruption. She has sat on a number of advisory boards and strategy panels for UK Government Departments, National Research Councils and NGOs, including the RCUK’s Scientific Advisory Committee on Energy, The Commission for Integrated Transport, Greener Journeys, Carplus and the Campaign for Better Transport. She is a founding editorial board member on the journal ‘Energy Efficiency’’.