Senior Leadership
Our Team
Dr. Atif Ansar
Dr. Atif Ansar serves as a Founder and Director of OxCarbon.
A Fellow of Keble College, Atif is Senior Teaching Fellow on the MSc in Major Programme Management and the Australian Major Projects Leadership Academy (AMPLA). He is the Founding Director of the Oxford Programme on the Sustainable Future of Capital-Intensive Industries, Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment. Atif is also the Executive Chairman of Foresight Works – an Oxford-based technology firm building next-gen software for the world’s megaprojects. Atif has been at the University of Oxford since 2006. From 2006 to 2010, he undertook his DPhil (PhD), at Brasenose College, with the prestigious Clarendon Scholarship from Oxford University Press. Atif was a post-doctoral research fellow at the BT Centre for Major Programme Management at Saïd Business School from 2010. From 2015 until 2020, Atif was Programme Director of the MSc in Major Programme Management and continues to be one of the senior teaching fellows on the course’s faculty. Atif also teaches at the UK and Australian Governments Major Projects Leadership Academy. In 2018, Atif began an appointment as a visiting scholar at Stanford University’s Global Projects Center and a Visiting Professorship at Tsinghua University.
Atif previously undertook his bachelor’s degree at the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University, where he majored in philosophy, politics, and economics.
Dr Caitlin McElroy
Dr Caitlin McElroy is a Departmental Research lecturer in Enterprise and the Environment at the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment (SSEE) and the School of Geography and the Environment
Caitlin is an economic geographer and her research has engaged with institutional theory, financial geography, science and technology studies, and environmental justice. Current research includes leading on Circular Resourcing, a related circular economy focused workstream as part of the Future of Cooling programme, and ongoing research on Sharing Resource Prosperity. She is also involved in partnerships to create tools to assist corporations, governments, and investors in the management of their environmental and social risks and opportunities such as with DAMSAT, a satellite-based dam monitoring project funded by the UK Space Agency. Support for her research has also come from the Oxford Martin School, The John Fell Fund, and as part of UpGro (NERC/ESRC/DFID).
Caitlin established and is the director of the Smith School’s executive education programme. Started in 2014, the programme has run bespoke courses for a range of organisations such as environmental judges selected by the Supreme People’s Court of the People’s Republic of China, institutional investors, and energy majors. It also runs a range of open-enrolment courses across the research areas of the SSEE.
Caitlin holds a BA (with Honours) from the University of Pennsylvania in History and Environmental Studies, an MSc in Nature, Society and Environmental Policy (with Distinction) and a DPhil in economic geography (Clarendon Scholar), both from the University of Oxford.
Stephen Lezak
Stephen is based at two universities - Oxford and Cambridge - and the non-profit Rocky Mountain Institute
Stephen is a Gates Scholar at the University of Cambridge Scott Polar Research Institute; he also leads an elective module on environmental political theory at the Oxford School of Geography and the Environment. After completing his MSc at Oxford in 2017, he returned to the Geography department as a researcher with the Gobi Framework, focusing on environmental justice and the political economy of the mining industry in Central Asia. He also collaborates with the Materials initiative at the Rocky Mountain Institute, promoting private-sector leadership to decarbonize the buildings blocks of the global energy transition. He served as an expert reviewer for the IPCC’s 6th Assessment Report and has advised two U.S. Presidential campaigns on climate policy.
Dr. Guy Wolf
Dr Guy Wolf is a Business Fellow at the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment, University of Oxford
and the Global Head of Market Analytics at Marex
enquiries@OxCarbon.org