Dr Xinfang Wang PhD, MInstR, PGCE, ACCA, MSc, BSc

Dr Xinfang Wang

School of Chemical Engineering
Associate Professor

Contact details

Email
x.wang.10@bham.ac.uk
Twitter
@XinfangWang
Address
Birmingham Energy Institute
School of Chemical Engineering
University of Birmingham
Edgbaston
Birmingham
B15 2TT
UK

Dr Xinfang Wang is Member of The Senate, and Group Leader of Resilient Systems for Energy and Cooling (ReSet Cool) in Birmingham Energy Institute. She is also the UK Energy Research Centre’s (UKERC) EDI champion and sits on the UKERC Research Committee, advising on its strategy and priorities of flexible fund.

Xinfang has published in top scientific journals and parliamentary POSTNotes in the fields of energy and cooling. She has a strong background in whole systems research for Net Zero energy and the cold chain, especially from behaviour, public perception, economic, business model, innovation system and policy perspectives. Her research covers both developed and developing countries such as Rwanda, Kenya, India, Bangladesh, Mexico, Nepal and China.

Xinfang has been PI and co-I on a list of projects with a total value of over £20 million that are funded by EU H2020, EPSRC, GCRF, Newton Fund, Defra, DESNZ (previously BEIS), World Bank, Wellcome Trust, and UKERC etc.

Qualifications

Associate Professor in Cold Economy:

  • Postgraduate Certificate in Education (PGCE), University of Birmingham, 2023
  • PhD in Sustainable Consumption 2017
  • MSc (Distinction) in Finance and Economics 2011
  • BSc (First Class equivalent) in Economics 2010
  • Association of Chartered Certified Accountant (ACCA) affiliate since 2010

Biography

UNSW SPREE 201906-05 Xinfang Wang - Energy resilience in developed and developing countries

Dr Wang has a background in energy and sustainability, behaviour and social practice, finance and economics, policy and whole systems research. She completed her PhD at the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research and Sustainable Consumption Institute in the University of Manchester before joining the University of Birmingham.

She has experience working with policymakers, industry leaders and academics internationally. Xinfang has led World Bank Group consultancy project from the University of Birmingham, co-ordinated by the International Institute of Refrigeration.

She also works with the United Nations Environment Programme United for Efficiency initiative on clean cooling and cold chains. She was an invited speaker at a round-table discussion with UK Science Minister and was interviewed by BEIS explaining the importance of women working in science and engineering.

Dr Wang has been leading major projects, such as:

  • PI for Zero Emission Cold-Chain (ZECC) - Building the Road to Sustainable Cold-Chain Systems for Food Resilience [EPSRC; 2021-2025]
  • PI at UoB for European Food Chain Supply to Reduce GHG Emissions by 2050 (ENOUGH) [EU H2020; 2021-2025]
  • PI at UoB for Transport, Industrial and Commercial Refrigeration (TICR) [DESNZ; 2022-2024]
  • PI at UoB for Par 1 Scoping study to assess the resilience of the UK’s cold supply chain to rising and extreme temperatures [Climate Change Committee; 2024]
  • PI at Chem Eng UoB for the UK’s fourth Climate Change Risk Assessment – Independent Assessment (CCRA4-IA) [Climate Change Committee; 2024-2025]
  • PI at Chem Eng UoB for A Health-centred Systems Approach towards Net-Zero: Transforming regional climate mitigation policies (Net Zero WM) [Wellcome Trust; 2023-2026]
  • Co-I for Community Cooling Hub (CCH) in Kenya [BEIS/ICF; 2021-2022]
  • Co-I for Clean and Energy Efficient Cooling for Livestock Supply Chains in Bangladesh [World Bank Group; 2021]
  • Co-I for African Centre of Excellence for Sustainable Cooling and Cold-chain (ACES) phase 1 [Defra/UNEP; 2020-2022]
  • Co-I for Fast-Track Vaccine Cold-Chain Assessment and Design for Mass Scale COVID-19 Vaccination in Bangladesh [UKRI GCRF/Newton Fund; 2020-2022]
  • Co-I for Sustainable Food Cold-Chains [UKERC; 2020-2022]
  • PI for Applying a Whole-Systems Approach to Explore Energy Resilience - Comparing Urban and Rural Areas in Nepal [Institute for Global Innovation; 2018-2021]
  • Co-I for Predicting the Uptake of Air Conditioning in UK Households to 2050 [UKERC; 2019]
  • Co-I for Zero Carbon Housing in the UK [Higher Education Innovation Funding; 2017]
  • Co-I for Energy Poverty in the UK [Higher Education Innovation Funding; 2016]

In addition, Xinfang has worked on a list of other projects on energy and cooling including:

  • Rapid Assessment of Vaccine Cold-chain – India [Shakti Foundation fund]
  • Rapid Assessment Methodology for Vaccine Cold-chain for Mass Immunisation – Rwanda [Hariot-Watt University fund]
  • EnergyRev [UKRI Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund]
  • Realising Energy Storage Technologies in Low-carbon Energy Systems (RESTLESS) [EPSRC fund]
  • Generation Integrated Energy Storage (GIES) [EPSRC fund]
  • Energy Storage Prioritisation in Mexico [Newton Fund]
  • Assessing the innovation process for energy storage [EPSRC SUPERGEN Energy Storage Hub fund]
  • Developing Cryogenic Energy Storage at Refrigerated Warehouses as an Interactive Hub to Integrate Renewable Energy in Industrial Food Refrigeration and to Enhance PowerGrid Sustainability (CryoHub) [Horizon 2020 fund]
  • Long-term institutional change in the wake of crisis: Understanding implications for energy-system resilience in Nepal [Institute for Global Innovation fund]
  • Resilient Cities [Institute for Global Innovation fund]

Teaching

Undergraduate teaching

  • LI Sustainable Process Engineering;
  • LM Energy Storage;LM Research Projects;
  • 3Yr Energy Economics;
  • Personal Academic Tutor.

Postgraduate teaching

  • Programme co-ordinator for MSc Global Energy Technologies and Systems
  • Global Energy Technologies and Systems;
  • Module lead for Sustainable Cooling and Cold Chain.

Postgraduate supervision

Xinfang supervises PhD, MSc and MEng students.

 

Xinfang is interested in supervising postgraduate/PhD students in the fields of energy, cooling, and transport for climate change mitigation and adaptation, particularly applying interdisciplinary and whole systems approaches. Please contact her if interested.

Research

Research interests

Xinfang’s broad-ranging research interests include energy, clean cooling and cold chains across building, agriculture, food, health and transport sectors, especially focusing on whole systems, policy, technology innovation, business model, and Sustainable Development Goals.

Other activities

  • Member of the Senate
  • Member of the UK Energy Research Centre (UKERC) Research CommitteeEquality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) Champion for UKERC
  • Member of the School of Chemical Engineering EDI committee

Publications

Zhang, L., Liu, Z., Zhang, L., Liu, Y., Shan, Y., Wang, X., Liu, Y., Zhang, L., Li, X., Li, X., Hao, Y., and Cui, Q. (2024). Modelling the socio-economic impacts of coal-fired electricity phaseout under carbon neutrality target: A dynamic CGE-based study of China. Resources, Conservation and Recycling 205, 107563. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.resconrec.2024.107563

Gage E., Wang X., Xu B., Foster A., Evans J., Terry L.A., Falagán N. (2024). Reducing food loss and waste contributes to energy, economic and environmental sustainability. Journal of Cleaner Production. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2024.142068

Lamidi, R., Wang, X., Mahood, H. B., Peters, T., Sayin, L., Marques, A. C. (2024). Emissions assessment of refrigerated food road transport in the UK. Institute of Refrigeration (IOR) Technical and Conference Paper. Institute of Refrigeration, UK. https://ior.org.uk/technical/rachp-publications?id=884&state=b

Mahood, H. B., Sayin, L., Wang, X., Alammar, A., Lamid, R. O., Singh, A., Allouche, Y., Peters, T. (2024). Estimation of the UK 2019 Baseline Year’s Energy Demand and Emissions of Temperature-Controlled Transport Using a Bottom-Up Model. 8th IIR Conference on Sustainability and the Cold Chain. Tokyo, Japan. 9th-12th June 2024.

Trotter, P. A., Becker, T., Renaldi, R., Wang, X., Khosla, R., and Walther,G. (2023). The role of supply chains for the sustainability transformation of global food systems: A large-scale, systematic review of food cold chains. Journal of Industrial Ecology. https://doi.org/10.1111/jiec.13445.

Moreira-Dantas, I., Martínez-Zarzoso, I., de Araujo, M. L. F., Evans, J., Foster, A., Wang, X., Thakur, M., Jafarzadeh, S., and Martin, M. P. (2023). Multi-Stakeholder Initiatives and Decarbonization in the European Food Supply Chain. Frontiers in Sustainability, Volume 4. https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/frsus.2023.1231684/full.

Zou, Y., Wu, J., Wang, X., Liu, G., Antonio, S., Manzardo, A. (2023). An improved artificial neural network using multi-source data to estimate food temperature during multi-temperature delivery. Journal of Food Engineering. Volume 351, 111518.

Wang. X. (2023)Chasing black swans: watering down net zero poses major climate threat. Birmingham Brief.

Wang, X., Reardon, L., To, L. S. (2022). Visualizing Nepal’s electricity supply resilience from a whole-systems perspective: A participatory approach. Energy Research & Social Science, 85, 102409.

Wang, X., Day, R., Murrant, D., Marín, A. D., Botello, D. C., González, F. L., Radcliffe, J. (2021). A capabilities-led approach to assessing technological solutions for a rural community. Energies, 14, 1398. https://doi.org/10.3390/en14051398.

Wang, X., Larkin, A., Abi Ghanem, D., McLachlan, C. (2021). How the term 'home' influences energy-consuming practices in domestic buildings. Energy Efficiency 14, 1. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12053-020-09910-3.

Debhath, K. B., Wang, X. (shared 1st author), Peters, T., Menon, S., Awate, S., Patwardhan, G., Wadkar, N., Patankar, M., and Shendage, P. (2021). Rural cooling needs assessment towards designing Community Cooling Hubs: Case studies from Maharashtra, India. Sustainability, 13(10). https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/13/10/5595.

Meng, M., Shang, W., Wang, X., Pang, T. (2020). When Will China Fulfill Its Carbon-related Intended Nationally Determined Contributions? An In-depth Environmental Kuznets Curve Analysis. Greenhouse Gases: Science and Technology. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/ghg.2023.

Wang, X., Meng, M. (2019). Understanding high-emitting households in the UK through a cluster analysis. Frontiers in Energy. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11708-019-0647-6.

Meng, M., Wu, S., Zhou, J., Wang, X. (2019). What is currently driving the growth of China’s household electricity consumption? A clustering and decomposition analysis. Sustainability 11, 4648. https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/11/17/4648.

Meng, M., Fu, Y., Wang, X. (2018). Decoupling, decomposition and forecasting analysis of China's fossil energy consumption from industrial output. Journal of Cleaner Production 177: 752-759. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2017.12.278.

Meng, M., Fu, Y., Shi, H., Wang, X. (2017). A small-sample adaptive hybrid model for annual electricity consumption forecasting. Mathematical Problems in Engineering 2017: 1-7. https://www.hindawi.com/journals/mpe/2017/7427131/.

Anderson, K., Larkin, A., McLachlan, C., Traut, M., Wang, X. (2016). Leaving the EU: Implications for UK climate policy. Submitted to UK Energy and Climate Change Committee by Tyndall Centre Manchester, the University of Manchester.

Nordhagen, S., Calverley, D., Foulds, C., O'Keefe, L., Wang, X. (2014) Climate change research and credibility: balancing tensions across professional, personal, and public domains, Climatic Change 125: 149-162. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10584-014-1167-3.

Wang, X., Reardon, L., To, L. S. (under minor revision). Visualizing energy resilience from a whole-systems perspective: A participatory approach. Energy Research & Social Science.

Wang, X.,Peters, T., Sayin, L., Xu, B., Debnath, K. B. (under review). Energy and cold-chain challenges for COVID-19 mass vaccination in the global south. Applied Energy

Apr 2021 Contributor and reviewer for UK Parliament POSTNote on Longer Duration Energy Storage.

Apr 2021 External reviewer for UK Parliament POSTNote on Sustainable Cooling.

Expertise

 
  • Food and vaccine cold chain
  • Energy
  • Emissions
  • Climate change mitigation and adaptation