Sibel Eker
Senior Research Scholar
Sustainable Service Systems Research Group
Energy, Climate, and Environment Program
Biography
Sibel Eker is a senior research scholar in the Sustainable Service Systems Research Group of the IIASA Energy, Climate, and Environment Program. Her interdisciplinary research profile combines systems analysis and engineering, decision sciences, and social sciences. Her work brings a systems thinking and uncertainty focus to climate change and sustainability problems with model-based approaches. Complementing her academic experience, she has worked with several stakeholders and policy actors such as the UK Department for Business, Energy, and Industrial Strategy, the World Bank, the European Institute of Innovation and Technology (EIT)-Climate Knowledge and Innovation Community (KIC), as well as other governmental and private organizations.
Her current research interests center around the drivers and implications of demand-side climate change mitigation, sustainable diets, and co-production of mitigation and sustainability scenarios through simple integrated assessment models, such as the FeliX model. Eker has had leading roles in related European research consortia, including the ongoing WorldTrans and CHOICE projects, and she is the principle investigator of LOW-AI.
Eker is a selected member of the Global Young Academy, where she co-led the Scientific Excellence Working Group between 2022 and 2024. She is also a Lead Author of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) Global Environment Outlook (GEO-7), as well as an editorial board member of Humanities and Social Sciences Communications and Mitigation and Adaptation Strategies for Global Change. She taught system dynamics modeling at the Nijmegen School of Management of Radboud University in The Netherlands and as part of the European master’s in system dynamics, first as an assistant, and then as an associate professor between 2021 and 2025. In 2020 and 2021, she was a senior researcher and modeler at Climate Interactive, working on the development of the C-ROADS and En-ROADS climate policy simulators.
Eker obtained her PhD degree in 2016 from Delft University of Technology in The Netherlands, with a focus on dealing with uncertainties in the Dutch natural gas sector. Prior to joining IIASA in 2017, she worked at University College London on integrated decision making in housing, energy, and wellbeing; and at Delft University of Technology on the resilience of the transport network in Bangladesh.
Last update: 16 SEP 2025
Publications
Liu, Q., Gao, L., Guo, Z., Dong, Y., Moallemi, E.A., Eker, S. , Yang, J., Obersteiner, M. , & Bryan, B.A. (2023). Robust strategies to end global poverty and reduce environmental pressures. One Earth 6 (4) 392-408. 10.1016/j.oneear.2023.03.007.
Eker, S. (2023). Using system dynamics to explore behavior change in integrated assessment context. In: LOOPS-5 Workshop, Conceptualizing and Navigating Earth Resilience in the Anthropocene, 27-29 March 2023, Stockholm, Sweden.
Eker, S. (2022). Achieving Resilience in a Complex World - Guidance for Action from Systems Sciences. In: Systems Analysis for Reducing Footprints and Enhancing Resilience Conference, November, 2022.
Liu, Q., Guo, Z., Gao, L., Dong, Y., Moallemi, E.A., Eker, S. , Yang, J., Li, X., Obersteiner, M. , & Bryan, B.A. (2022). A review of model-based scenario analysis of poverty for informing sustainability. Environmental Science & Policy 137 336-348. 10.1016/j.envsci.2022.09.005.