Lucy Yu

Lucy Yu is CEO at Octopus Energy’s Centre for Net Zero, a pioneering research lab focused on delivering a fast, fair and affordable energy transition.

Lucy has nearly 20 years of experience in technology, policy and regulation. She has led teams in the UK government’s Cabinet Office, Department for Transport, and Centre for Connected and Autonomous Vehicles (CCAV), and at the UN’s International Telecommunication Union. Her work has focused on future mobility and cities; sustainability and renewable energy; and AI, data, and digital technologies. She has written extensively on these topics for the tech press and peer-reviewed journals, and has spoken widely including for Wired and SLUSH.

Outside government she has run operations, public policy, research and strategy functions for some of Europe’s brightest startups including SwiftKey (artificial intelligence); Voi Technology (micromobility); Cucumber (software development); and Five (autonomous vehicles). She has been named a Financial Times Top 100 Most Influential BAME Leader in tech (2019) and a Diversity UK Top 100 Asian Star in UK Tech and Top 5 Star in GreenTech (2021).

Lucy is a Non-Executive Director at the Connected Places Catapult, the UK’s national accelerator for cities, transport and places; and an Associate Fellow of Technology and Public Policy at the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change. She is a trained scientist and holds a degree in chemistry from Imperial College specialising in computational and physical chemistry.