Chris West
Deputy Centre Director for Research

Profile

Biography

Chris is SEI York's Deputy Director for Research and leads its Sustainable Consumption and Production group. He has a multidisciplinary background encompassing environmental science, ecology, mathematics and economics, and sits on the Academic Panel of Theme 2 (Sustainable Supply Chains) of the University of York’s N8 AgriFood Programme and on the Steering Group of SEI’s Producer to Consumer Sustainability Initiative. He served as Acting Centre Director for York in from August 2019 to March 2020.

At SEI, he has led and contributed to a number of projects developing an understanding of the links between international supply chain and environmental impact and risk, which includes the development of SEI’s hybrid multi-regional input output model (IOTA) and material flow platform (Trase). He engages actively (including via workshops and other face-to-face activities) with policy, business and third-sector practitioners in the development of this work.

He is Co-Investigator on a number of major international and national projects where he leads work on the quantitative and qualitative analysis of food supply chains and associated environmental and social impacts and risks. This includes the York-based IKnowFood project, the GCRF Trade, Environment and Development Hub, and the H2020 Cascades project. Other work includes contribution to the NETpositive Initiative which is developing tools to introduce small and medium sized enterprise to economic, social and environmental sustainability, and contributing to the data that underpins WWF’s carbon footprint calculators.

Career

Chris comes from an ecology background, having completed a PhD in Fisheries Management in January 2011 which made use of agent-based modelling approaches, and has a broader interest in the study of complex systems and in particular the interplay between biological and environmental systems and society.

University roles

Chair of the SEI York Research Committee