Karoline Rogge is Professor of Sustainability Innovation and Policy at the Science Policy Research Unit (SPRU) at the University of Sussex Business School, and principal investigator of the EMPOCI project on governing the acceleration of sustainable energy-mobility transitions. She was Co-Director of the Sussex Energy Group from April 2017 until August 2021, and inaugural Course Director of SPRU's online MSc in Energy Policy in 2018/19. Karoline joined SPRU in November 2013 from the Fraunhofer Institute for Systems and Innovation Research (Fraunhofer ISI) in Karlsruhe, Germany, where she has been working on energy and climate policy since 2004 and continues to be affiliated with as senior researcher - and since July 2019 as Deputy Head of the Department Policy & Society. Since October 2024 Karoline is also affiliated with the Bennett Institute for Innovation and Policy Acceleration at the University of Sussex.

Karoline's interdisciplinary research combines insights from economics, innovation & transition studies and policy sciences to investigate the interplay between policy and innovation, with a focus on the energy and mobility systems. Karoline's research ranges from evaluating the innovation impact of single policy instruments, such as the EU emissions trading system - the topic of her PhD at ETH Zurich - to analyzing the effects of comprehensive policy mixes for promoting the transition of our systems of production and consumption to climate neutrality. 

Currently, Karoline's main research focus lies on the acceleration of sustainable energy-mobility transitions, which she is investigating in the EMPOCI project (2020-2026, funded by the European Research Council). Together with her team she is investigating regional and national policy mixes in the fields of climate and industrial policy in the increasingly interconnected electricity-mobility-ICT sectors (in the UK, Germany, China and USA) and how these shape - and are shaped - by low-carbon innovations of multiple actors from business, policy, academia and society, with a special focus on the role of transformative capacities and global dynamics. 

In 2025 Karoline embarked on a journey of further widening her green transition research by bridging it with democracy research, with a focus on the local level. More specifically, she is deputy scientific coordinator of the GreenDEMO project led by Fraunhofer ISI (2025-27, funded by Horizon Europe), which is investigating how administrative innovations by city governments can make green transitions more democratic and democracies greener. Combining the expertise of five academic partners, the city network ICLEI and eight city partners, the team will co-create innovation demonstrators (in Bristol, Mannheim and Aalborg) and roadmaps for fellow city actions (in Glasgow, Bamberg, Aarhus, Poznan and Schaerbeek). This line of city-level transition research started in 2019, when Karoline was the scientific coordinator of a 3-year EU project on social innovation in energy transitions (SONNET, 2019-2021, funded by EU Horizon 2020), in which she led a consortium of 13 European partners, six of them cities - among them Bristol in the UK and Mannheim in Germany - and acted as work package leader of the socio-political aspects associated with accelerating low-carbon energy transitions through social innovation, such as energy cooperatives, crowdfunding, prosuming, gamification, campaigning or experimentation.

For the next few years, Karoline will be also sparheading a strategic initiative accompanying a wide variety of research projects investigating the energy transition and society in Germany (2025-2029, funded by the German Federal Ministry of Economic Affairs and Energy, BMWE). In this so called 'Begleitforschung' conducted by Fraunhofer ISI and IÖW, the focus lies on networking, synthesizing and transfering research results to multiple stakeholders and decision makers, as well as orchestrating a Foresight process to identify future research needs. 

Previously, Karoline has led the GRETCHEN project (2012-15, funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research, BMBF) investigating the influence of the policy mix for renewable energies on technological and structural change in Germany. Karoline has also contributed her policy mix expertise to the Centre on Innovation and Energy Demand (CIED) at the University of Sussex (2014-2019, funded by the RCUK Energy Programme), with a focus on combining innovation and transition studies with theories of the policy process. In addition, she was Fraunhofer ISI's principal investigator of the European project PATHWAYS (2014-16, funded by EU FP7), which explored transitions pathways to sustainable, low carbon societies. Here, Karoline performed a multi-level analysis for the electricity sector in Germany, comparing it with the low-carbon energy transition in the UK. She was also involved in the ENavi Kopernikus project (2017-19, funded by BMBF) in which she surveyed low-carbon managerial decision-making in Germany's energy intensive industries. More recently, Karoline has investigated industrial policy and institutional change in the context of smart energy transitions within the SET project (2015-2020, funded by the Academy of Finland's Strategic Research Council), comparing Denmark, UK and Germany.

With her problem-driven and policy-oriented research Karoline is one of nine Sussex academics named in the 2021 Highly Cited Researchers List compiled by Clarivate Analytics, indicating that she has produced multiple highly cited papers in the last decade, with her papers ranking in the top 1% by citations for her publication field and year. Karoline has contributed her climate policy mix expertise to the IPCC's Sixth Assessment Report of Working Group III on the Mitigation of Climate Change (published in April 2022) as contributing author of chapter 13 on National and Sub-national Policies and Institutions. In addition, fifteen of her research outputs were cited across this IPCC report (in chapters 2, 4-6, 9, 11, and 13-17).

Karoline has been involved in advising policy makers in Germany, Luxembourg, China, the UK and the EU on climate policy and innovation. Prior to joining academia she has worked as consultant to the OECD in Paris and the World Bank Institute in Washington, DC, and before that did internships with the city administration of Berlin, the German Environmental Protection Agency in Berlin, the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research in Leipzig and Siemens Medical in Erlangen. 

Karoline did her postgraduate studies in innovation studies (ETH Zurich), her graduate studies in environmental and ecological economics (University of Heidelberg, University of Maryland) and her undergraduate studies in geo-ecology and business administration (TU Bergakademie Freiberg). She is grateful for several scholarships that supported her academic training - granted by the German Academic Scholarship Foundation, the Fulbright Program and the Fast Track Program of the Robert Bosch Stiftung.

Karoline has two children and is a big fan of the Eurostar connecting London with Paris & Brussels (and thus ultimately Brighton and Karlsruhe).