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.She is the Programme Leader in Zero Carbon Energy Use at the ZERO Institute.
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. She is also Co-Investigator of Oxford Net Zero, an interdisciplinary research programme aimed at informing effective, equitable, and ambitious climate action. Alongside she leads complementary research projects on urban transitions and energy consumption (focussing on India). She is a contributing author to the sixth assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and lead author of the UNEP Emissions Gap Report (2020).
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 urbanise? 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 characterise 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.
