Jennifer Burney

Executive committee, Center for Energy Research

Affiliate, Center for Effective Global Action

Jennifer Burney is an environmental scientist at the School of Global Policy and Strategy whose research focuses on simultaneously achieving global food security and mitigating climate change. She designs, implements and evaluates technologies for poverty alleviation and agricultural adaptation, and studies the links between “energy poverty” — the lack of access to modern energy services — and food or nutrition security, the mechanisms by which energy services can help alleviate poverty, the environmental impacts of food production and consumption, and climate impacts on agriculture.

Much of her current research focuses on the developing world, and she is particularly interested in the science, technology and policy of short-lived climate pollutants, or SLCPs, and the role that mitigation of these compounds can play in meeting both climate and food security objectives.

She is a research affiliate at UC San Diego’s Policy Design and Evaluation Laboratory, a fellow at the Center on Food Security & the Environment at Stanford University and member of the National Geographic Explorers family. She leads the Science Policy Fellows Program at the School of Global Policy and Strategy.