Kavita Surana

Kavita Surana is a Professor at the Vienna University of Economics and Business (WU Vienna), where she holds the BMIMI Endowed Professorship for Data-Driven Knowledge Generation: Climate Action and heads the Institute for Data, Energy, and Sustainability (IDEaS). She is also a Senior Fellow at the Center for Global Sustainability at the University of Maryland, College Park, and Associate Faculty at the Complexity Science Hub Vienna. 

Dr. Surana's research examines energy innovation and technological change—specifically, how technology, investment, and policy interact to shape the scaling of climate and energy solutions across start-ups, corporations, and infrastructure systems. Her work applies data-driven methods to study the development, diffusion, and deployment of climate and energy technologies from three perspectives—technology and sector, firm and investor, and system—and how these dynamics drive competitiveness and decarbonization regionally and globally. Her research has been supported by grants from the US National Science Foundation and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and published in journals such as Nature Energy, Nature Climate Change, Joule, and Research Policy. She served as a contributing author to the IPCC's Sixth Assessment Report (Working Group III), is Associate Editor of Energy and Climate Change, and serves on the Scientific Advisory Board of the European Forum Alpbach. 

Previously, Dr. Surana was an Assistant Research Professor at the University of Maryland's Center for Global Sustainability at the School of Public Policy, and an Associate and Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard Kennedy School's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. Her industry and policy experience includes working as an electricity markets analyst at ICF International, a consultant for the World Bank, and a venture capital investor at Xista Science Ventures in Austria. She began her career as a materials physicist at the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission (CEA), where her doctoral work on semiconductor nanomaterials led to patents. 

She holds a PhD in Materials Science and Engineering from the Institut Polytechnique de Grenoble, France (jointly with the CEA), an MS in Materials for Energy Storage and Conversion from Paul Sabatier University, Toulouse, France (as an Erasmus Mundus scholar), and a BSc in Physics from St. Stephen's College, Delhi, India. 

Further information on publications and projects can be found here: PURE