Emma Somos
DPhil in Sociology
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St Catherine's College
Thesis: Elites and climate change: Untangling elite interests and attitude formation in the face of the climate crisis
Supervisor: Professor Stephen Fisher
Emma Somos is a DPhil candidate in Sociology at the University of Oxford. Prior to pursuing the PhD, she completed the MSc in Sociology at Oxford, and a BSc in Sociology at the London School of Economics.
Emma has contributed to climate policy work as a COP29 delegate with the UK Youth Climate Coalition and worked with the United Nations Development Programme's Independent Evaluation Office in policy evaluation.
She is a Junior Dean and Graduate Scholar at St Catherine’s College, University of Oxford and teaches Political Sociology and Demography tutorials at various Oxford colleges.
Emma's DPhil research examines how billionaires engage with climate change, why some billionaires are more climate conscious than others and how and to what extent they can influence climate policy and outcomes.
Using mixed methods and scraping online, public data, her work sheds light on the effects of extreme wealth accumulation on climate politics globally and on how economic influence plays out in climate policy, contributing to wider discussions on effective climate solutions, the super-rich, the social implications of the climate crisis and inequality in carbon emissions.
Her research has been supported by St Catherine’s College, the Cambridge-Oxford Alumni Club of Hungary and the Department of Sociology.
Research Interests: Elites, environmental attitudes, climate policy, social stratification, social mobility, politics of climate change
Previous Education: BSc Sociology, London School of Economics; MSc Sociology, University of Oxford
