Elif Naz Çoker, Post Doctoral Research Fellow, University College London

I’m a postdoctoral research fellow in environmental behaviors based at the Energy Institute, Bartlett School of Environment, Energy, and Resources, University College London. My main role within BR-UK is in Theme 1, Environment and Sustainability. We are focusing on interventions for domestic heating and cooling behaviors, synthesizing existing evidence in the field and exploring the role of temporality and sequencing in the effectiveness of these interventions. I am also working on the Demo 4 Project, which consists of a segmentation analysis of sustainable behaviours in energy, food, and transportation sectors in nine OECD member countries. As I am based at UCL, I am also in close contact and collaboration with BR-UK colleagues based in the Centre for Behaviour Change, as well as those in Universities of Edinburgh and Cardiff. I apply a mixed methods approach to my research which includes systematic reviews, intervention design and implementation, and qualitative evaluations of intervention effectiveness. 

I have a multidisciplinary background in social sciences. I hold two Bachelor’s degrees: one in Political Sciences with a minor in Middle Eastern Studies, and another in Psychology with a minor in Sociology.. I always had an interest in determinants of policy support and acceptability, and how humans change and adapt their behaviors in different contexts. I took a brief detour and worked with infants and toddlers on executive function development during my master’s degree in Social and Developmental Psychology. This helped me have a deep understanding of concepts of cognitive processing, emotional regulation, empathy, and social influence that apply to adults as well as children. I then pivoted into pro-environmental behavioral research motivated by my interest in climate change, sustainability, and evidence based policy making, and have been in this space since. 

I very recently finished my DPhil (PhD) in Health Behaviors at University of Oxford’s Primary Care Health Sciences department in February 2025. My thesis was on leveraging social norms to design interventions to reduce meat consumption for better planetary health outcomes. I have an expertise in designing and implementing interventions in real-world settings and multilevel quantitative data analysis and am passionate about public engagement and science communications. 

My interest in complex sustainable behaviors and related sociocultural barriers and enablers led me to eventually change domains from dietary to energy-related behaviours, with climate change mitigation and adaptation and health co-benefits being the common link connecting the two. 

Maintaining a connection to the real world and not forgetting the fact that we are working to help improve the lives of real people. Sometimes it is easy to get caught up in the nitty gritty of academic research, or to forget how controversial some of the topics we work on are to people outside of academia (e.g. promotion of plant-based diets, transition towards net-zero). Keeping up with local and global news, having an awareness of new policies being implemented, understanding the priorities of various stakeholders can all help your research remain grounded and relevant. 

People are at the core of behavioral research, so good communication skills are crucial to working in this area. Being a good listener and observer and just engaging with people in your everyday life can provide new insights into barriers and enablers of behaviors that research is yet to capture or elaborate on. Behavioral research is also very multidisciplinary, so being able to read papers from different fields and keeping an open mind to different theories and methodologies from different disciplines will come very handy. But above all, staying curious about how and why people do the things they do and having a passion for wanting to help people make positive behavioral changes in their lives are the true keys to a career in this field.