Panmure House Inaugural Fellows

For Boado-Penas, Professor in MACS, the opportunity to work across disciplines and engage in joint research projects will be critical to the success of her research around Sustainable Climate Insurance. Boado-Penas' research is directly aligned with the research themes and goals of the Panmure House Fellowship, and the Department of Actuarial Mathematics and Statistics has already forged meaningful connections with prominent businesses such as Geocapita, Hymans Robertson, Moodys, and the Department for Work and Pensions. Working collaboratively with Panmure House, however, will allow her work to make the greatest impact on society. ‘My research on pensions addresses a crucial and highly topical subject due to the continuing population ageing,’ explains Boado-Penas. ‘Given its inherently interdisciplinary nature, pensions research stands to benefit significantly from collaboration with both Panmure House Fellows and EBS academics.’ 

Ceylan, whose research unites theory and practice through a focus on consumer behaviour and well-being, is committed to equipping marketers, policymakers, and consumers with the tools they need to be successful. ‘Sustainable product offerings have substantially increased in the marketplace,’ reflects Ceylan. ‘However, it is still challenging for marketers to guide consumers towards sustainable product offerings in a mutually beneficial way.’ To address this challenge, Ceylan and her research team have proposed a range of critical projects designed to explore the role of AI agents in marketing communications to promote sustainable product consumption. ‘We argue that when the right marketing communication strategy is used in interactions with potential customers via AI agents, AI can effectively increase consumers’ willingness to purchase and consume sustainable products and hence improve their well-being,’ she explains. Ceylan’s proposed activity will enable EBS to contribute to sustainable development, build research expertise in sustainable systems and well-being, and support inclusivity by offering managerial and policy implications in enhancing the health and well-being of individuals and societies globally.

For McLaughlin, applying for the Panmure House Fellowship was a natural extension of his career-long commitment to world-leading research on economics, history, and sustainable capitalism. McLaughlin, who has published widely on Inclusive Wealth – academia’s attempt to measure the wealth of a country by taking account of different forms of capital and tracking the change in wealth – is guided by his desire to learn important lessons from the past to better shape our future: ‘I believe that better informed policy can lead to an improvement in real world outcomes. Improving how we measure wealth will be key to managing problems of sustainable development in the future.’ According to McLaughlin, the Panmure House Fellowship will provide a strong foundation for critical contributions of knowledge to the field of economics: ‘The Panmure House Fellowship will enable me to focus on transforming society through the development of new understandings about the trajectory of the global economy over time and space. A better understanding of how we arrived on our current path through a more informed appreciation of the role of natural capital will help us monitor and manage future developments.’ 

Professor Beth Watts-Cobbe is Deputy Director at the Institute for Social Policy, Housing and Equalities Research (I-SPHERE), Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh. She is an applied social scientist committed to to achieving real world impacts through her research. She is an expert on homelessness, housing, poverty and broader questions about the design, effectiveness and ethical legitimacy of social and welfare policies. She leads the 2021-26 Crisis-funded Homelessness Monitors project tracking the impacts of economic and policy change on homelessness across Great Britain and a Joseph Rowntree Foundation-funded study exploring how to address homelessness and destitution among migrants excluded from the social safety-net in Scotland.