Shonali Pachauri

Biography

Shonali Pachauri is research group leader of the Transformative Institutional and Social Solutions Research Group, in the Energy, Climate, and Environment Program at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) in Austria. Prior to this, she served as acting director of the former Transitions to New Technologies Program and as senior research scholar in the former Energy Program at IIASA. She has also served as adjunct professor at the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, where she taught graduate courses during the fall semester of 2016.

Pachauri's research focuses on the role of social, institutional, and technological innovations for inclusive human development, particularly for those people without access to basic infrastructures and services. She coordinates and leads research on analyzing heterogeneities in energy and infrastructural access and use. Her work explores pathways for achieving universal access to decent living energy services for human wellbeing and assessing the wider impacts of this for sustainable development. She has published extensively on these topics, both in the form of scientific peer-reviewed articles and policy reports.

She was a lead author for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Working Group III Sixth Assessment Report (AR6) and was coordinating lead author for the Global Energy Assessment (GEA). She serves on the science advisory panel for the Climate and Clean Air Coalition (CCAC) and on the advisory group for the International Network on Gender and Energy (ENERGIA). She is also on the editorial advisory boards for the journals Environmental Research Letters, Current Research in Environmental Sustainability, Economics of Energy & Environmental Policy, and Global Environmental Change. She holds a PhD from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich (ETHZ) and an MSc from University College London (UCL).


Last update: 17 FEB 2023