Leila Niamir

Biography

Leila Niamir is a senior research scholar in the IIASA Energy, Climate, and Environment (ECE) Program. She is a computational economist working on energy demand and climate change mitigation. Her research focuses on cities and the built environment, behavioral and lifestyle changes, human wellbeing, and agent-based modeling.

She established and leads the Urban Futures Hub, a pioneering research initiative dedicated to studying cities and their role in climate change.

She has served as an author on several Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) assessment reports, including Climate Change 2022: Mitigation of Climate Change and the Climate Change 2023: Synthesis Report in the Sixth Assessment Cycle. Currently, she serves as a Lead Author of Chapter 3: Actions and solutions to reduce urban risks and emissions for the IPCC Special Report on Climate Change and Cities, and as the Coordinating Lead Author of Chapter 5: Enablers and Barriers, in Working Group III (Mitigation of Climate Change) of the Seventh Assessment Cycle.

She received her doctoral degree from the University of Twente in the Netherlands on Behavioral Climate Change Mitigation in 2019 and worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK), Germany. She is passionate about promoting science for society and actively works on the science-policy-society interface. She is an elect-member of the Global Young Academy, IAP Urban Health and Wellbeing, and serves as co-editor for the Climate Change Collection for Frontiers for Young Minds, a collection designed to communicate climate science to children and young audiences.



Last update: 27 OCT 2025