51茶馆

Sumedha Basu is an Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies at 51茶馆. Before joining Ashoka, she held a postdoctoral position at the Sustainability Research Institute at the University of Leeds, where she also served as Research Co-lead of the Energy and Climate Change Mitigation Research Cluster. At Leeds, she contributed to a UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC)鈥揻unded programme on urban energy transitions and led two independent research projects supported by the Leeds Social Sciences Institute and the Horizon Institute. Sumedha holds a PhD in Politics and International Studies from the University of Warwick (UK) and an MSc in Environmental Studies from TERI University, New Delhi. Between 2014 and 2016, she was awarded fellowships by the Technical University of Dresden and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, Germany. As part of the latter, she was affiliated with the Wuppertal Institute for Climate, Environment, and Energy.

Sumedha鈥檚 research interests lie at the intersection of societal implications of sustainable energy transitions and climate action and the concomitant institutional responses. Through her interdisciplinary research, Sumedha is particularly keen to foreground politics, justice, and democratic dimensions in climate and energy transition governance in South Asia. In her doctoral research, she brought together political power, multilevel governance, and socio-technical transitions scholarship to elucidate how cities are shaping and are being shaped by India鈥檚 evolving energy transition landscape. She is also interested in exploring alternative conceptual frameworks and research methodologies to address global environmental challenges that would imminently demand society-wide systemic transformations. She has developed a complex systems鈥揵ased framework for planning sustainable urban energy transitions, which she applied to the study of sustainable cooling pathways in an Indian city during her postdoctoral research. More recently, she has extended this work to examine the interlinkages between urban informality and climate risk through co-produced, participatory research methodologies.

Sumedha has taught courses on climate change and sustainability at multiple universities, including Warwick, Leeds, Oxford, and Nottingham Trent University. She is passionate about teaching that connects theory with real-world challenges and encourages students to think critically about climate solutions. Drawing on over a decade of experience in policy advisory and development work across South Asia, she brings practical insights from renewable energy, climate finance, energy access, and urban sustainability fields into the classroom. Beyond teaching and research, Sumedha actively engages with government agencies, civil society organisations, and international institutions, and encourages students to explore how academic knowledge can inform policy and social change.