Dr Radhika Khosla

Dr Radhika Khosla is Associate Professor at the Smith School of Enterprise and Environment, School of Geography and the Environment, and Research Director of the Oxford India Centre for Sustainable Development, Somerville College, at the University of Oxford. She works on examining the productive tensions between urban transitions, energy services consumption and climate change with a focus on developing country cities. Radhika is Principal Investigator of the Oxford Martin School’s interdisciplinary and multi-country programme on the Future of Cooling, which examines and helps shape the unprecedented increase in cooling energy demand growth and its relationship to the sustainable development goals. She is Co-Investigator of Oxford Net Zero, an interdisciplinary research programme aimed at informing effective, equitable, and ambitious climate action; and Co-Investigator of the ZERO Institute, which brings together Oxford research on zero-carbon energy systems. Radhika’s other current academic affiliations are at University of Pennsylvania (USA), and the Centre for Policy Research (India). She serves on the UK’s Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office UK-India Advisory Board; on the Steering Committee of the Smart Surfaces Coalition; on boards of journals and book presses; and on a range of advisory roles within Oxford. The two sets of interrelated questions underlie her research priorities. First, how does consumption of energy-related services change as cities urbanize? What are the socio-technical systems and institutional structures that shape (and can reconfigure) energy and carbon emission pathways? Second, what forms of governance and political rationalities characterize the varied urban responses to climate change in rapidly developing cities, given their (often competing) objectives to provide urban services? Her broader interdisciplinary research examines how cities in transition manage the tensions of meeting growing energy needs for development while protecting the local and global environment. Previously, she has been a Research Affiliate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (USA), Fellow at the Centre for Policy Research (India), and Staff Scientist at the Natural Resources Defense Council (USA). Radhika holds a PhD in the Geophysical Sciences from the University of Chicago and an undergraduate and master’s degrees in Physics from the University of Oxford.