Leila Niamir

Biography

Dr Leila Niamir is a senior research scholar in the IIASA Energy, Climate, and Environment (ECE) Program. She is a computational economist working on energy demand and climate change mitigation. Her research focuses on cities and the built environment, behavioral and lifestyle changes, human wellbeing, and agent-based modeling.

She established and leads the IIASA Urban Futures Hub, a pioneering research initiative dedicated to studying cities and their role in climate change.

Leila has served as an author on several Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) assessment reports, including Climate Change 2022: Mitigation of Climate Change and Climate Change 2023: Synthesis Report in the Sixth Assessment Cycle. Currently, she serves as a Lead Author of Chapter 3: Actions and solutions to reduce urban risks and emissions in the IPCC Special Report on Climate Change and Cities, and as the Coordinating Lead Author of Chapter 5: Enablers and Barriers in Working Group III (Mitigation of Climate Change) in the Seventh Assessment Cycle.

She received her doctoral degree from the University of Twente in The Netherlands on Behavioral Climate Change Mitigation in 2019 and worked as a postdoctoral researcher at Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK), Germany.