Kavita Surana
University of Maryland College Park & CSH Associate Faculty
Kavita Surana has been a member of the CSH Associate Faculty since Jan 2022. She is an Assistant Research Professor at the Center for Global Sustainability, School of Public Policy, University of Maryland College Park (USA). She is also a principal at IST cube (Austria), where she invests in early-stage science-based start-ups and spin-offs linked to the physical sciences or to climate, energy, and sustainability topics.
Kavita holds a PhD in materials science from the University of Grenoble Alpes (Grenoble INP) and the CEA, a master in materials for energy storage and conversion from Paul Sabatier University, Toulouse (France) as part of a joint European Erasmus Mundus program, and a bachelor in physics from St. Stephen’s College at Delhi University (India). She was a PostDoc at Harvard University (Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs).
Her research focuses on innovation in climate and energy technologies and the interactions between public policy and private firms to address global and local green transition challenges. She worked at the French Alternative and Atomic Energies Commission (CEA) as a materials scientist developing innovative solar cells and at ICF International in their energy advisory team in modeling electricity systems and markets. She has led multiple policy reports on energy and innovation targeted towards regional and national policymakers and has worked on various consulting projects, including with the World Bank.
Kavita’s research has been published in journals including Nature Energy, Nature Climate Change, Research Policy, and Technological Forecasting and Social Change. Her research projects have been funded by the US National Science Foundation, Energy Futures Initiative, and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.
Mail: surana@csh.ac.at
