Charlotte Wagner

Charlotte Wagner is a Scientist at SEI US. Her research focuses on greenhouse gas mitigation, the water-energy-food nexus, land use, and the impacts of air and water pollution on human health and ecosystems. Charlotte has over 10 years of expertise in assessing the magnitude and impacts of human-made pollution, including greenhouse gas and chemical pollution. She is particularly interested in linkages between climate change, environmental pollution, and public health, and seeks to create useful models and quantitative analyses that support rigorous environmental and public health policymaking.

Charlotte leads SEI’s work on ocean pollution in small-scale fisheries and is involved in assessing impacts of critical mineral mining on ecosystems and human health. As part of the Energy Modeling Program, she leads environmental and energy modeling and policy analysis, working with a variety of public stakeholders in Central Asia on climate-resilient integrated water-energy-food planning and in Morocco on the national Net Zero Strategy. She contributes to the technical development of SEI’s modeling tools, such as the Low Emissions Analysis Platform (LEAP), the Next Energy Modeling system for Optimization (NEMO), and the Water Evaluation and Planning software.

Charlotte joined SEI in 2021 after graduating from Harvard University with a PhD in Environmental Science and Engineering. During her doctorate, Charlotte studied the impact of climate change and regulation on the presence of pollutants in the environment, with a special focus on ocean pollution. She developed large-scale emission inventories and global biogeochemical simulations for persistent organic pollutants using climate models, statistics and GIS. She also worked with NASA DEVELOP on a heat vulnerability index for the City of Philadelphia and was a delegate on Harvard University’s Climate Task Force. Prior to her PhD, Charlotte worked as a scientific editor on the health risks of chemicals used in food packaging at the Zurich-based NGO Food Packaging Forum.

Charlotte holds a PhD in Environmental Science and Engineering from Harvard University, a MSc in Environmental Health from the Cyprus University of Technology, and a BA in Political Science and Environmental Policy from the University of Maastricht, The Netherlands.