Dr. Roger Cremades Rodeja

Roger is Associate Professor of Urban Environmental Change at the Sustainability Research Institute, School of Earth and Environment, University of Leeds. I arrived in Leeds in 2024 after a PhD at the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology and the University of Hamburg, postdoctoral and principal investigator roles in the Helmholtz Association at the Climate Service Center Germany, and an Assistant Professor position at Wageningen University. I work with concepts and methods of complex systems science on the (co-)development of simulation tools to explore sustainable urban futures and its interactions with environmental change within and outside the administrative city boundaries, including the role of plausible urban transformations and their water-energy-food-biodiversity nexus.

I have more than 20 years of experience working with cities on multiple capacities, from stakeholder and consultant to researcher. I coordinated research and co-production projects above £1M, and published about urban and water topics in top journal like PNAS, Ecological Economics, Nature Climate Change, Nature Food, and Nature Geoscience. I am elected Executive Committee member of the Network for Computational Modeling in the Social and Ecological Sciences (CoMSES Net, 2024-2026), elected member of the Council of the Complex Systems Society (2019-2022, re-elected 2022-2025), and co-chaired the Development Team of the Finance and Economics Knowledge-Action Network of Future Earth (2020-2022). I am known for applying innovative complex systems methods. I like good coffee, good food, and multiple fermentation processes (e.g. kefir, circular sriracha, tie guan yin, sourdough). A few times every winter, I either break the ice in a frozen lake and jump into the water, or do things of the sort on freezing torrents.