Dr Radhika Khosla

Associate Professor in the School of Geography and the Environment

Dr Radhika Khosla is the Research Director of the Oxford India Centre for Sustainable Development at Somerville College, and an Associate Professor at the Smith School of Enterprise and Environment, School of Geography and the Environment, 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. 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 drivers, 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.

Radhika's other academic affiliations are at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (USA), University of Pennsylvania (USA), and the Centre for Policy Research (India). Her previous roles include Fellow at the Centre for Policy Research in New Delhi, where she worked on the analytic and strategic dimensions of India's energy and climate policies, with a focus on the technological, institutional and behavioural aspects of energy use and its lock-in to rapidly growing urban environments. She was also Staff Scientist at the Natural Resources Defense Council in New York where she helped set up the organization's work on clean energy and climate change in India and led research and implementation on building energy policies in Indian states. She serves on government policy committees, and boards of journals and book presses.

She 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.