Dr. Varun Sivaram

Director

Dr. Varun Sivaram has been one of our Directors since September 2020. Dr. Sivaram is a physicist, bestselling author and clean energy technology expert with experience spanning the corporate, policy, and academic sectors—most recently as Chief Technology Officer of ReNew Power Limited, India’s largest renewable energy firm. He is currently a senior research scholar at the Columbia University Center for Global Energy Policy and was formerly fellow and director of the energy program at the Council on Foreign Relations, senior energy advisor to the Los Angeles Mayor and New York Governor’s office, adjunct professor at Georgetown University, and consultant at McKinsey & Co. He serves on the advisory boards of the Stanford University Precourt Institute for Energy and the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment, as a senior fellow at the Aspen Institute and the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, and as a senior advisor to Camus Energy and Radia, Inc. TIME Magazine named him to its TIME 100 Next list of the next hundred most influential people in the world. His books include “Taming the Sun: Innovations to Harness Solar Energy and Power the Planet,” “Energizing America: A Roadmap to Launch a National Energy Innovation Mission,” and “Digital Decarbonization: Promoting Digital Innovations to Advance Clean Energy Systems.” A Rhodes and Truman Scholar, he holds a Ph.D. in condensed matter physics from Oxford University and undergraduate degrees from Stanford University.