Varun Sivaram

Varun Sivaram is the Douglas Dillon fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), a nonpartisan foreign-policy think tank and membership organization. He is the acting director of the CFR program on energy security and climate change and an expert on clean energy technology, climate change, and sustainable urbanization.

Sivaram holds a B.S. in engineering physics and a B.A. in international relations from Stanford University, where he was awarded a Truman Scholarship. He also holds a Ph.D. in condensed matter physics from St. John's College, Oxford University, where he was a Rhodes Scholar. While at Oxford, he researched perovskite solar cells under Henry Snaith.

Sivaram was previously the senior advisor for energy and water policy to Los Angeles Mayor Antonio R. Villaraigosa, where he oversaw the city's Department of Water and Power. Sivaram is currently a strategic advisor to the office of New York Governor Andrew Cuomo on energy policy, an adjunct professor at the Georgetown University School of Foreign Service, and an advisory board member for the Stanford University Woods Institute for the Environment and Precourt Institute for Energy.

Bill Gates has called Sivaram's 2016 essay on clean energy innovation in Foreign Affairs magazine "One of the best arguments I've read for why the U.S. should invest in an energy revolution."

• Sivaram, Varun, and Teryn Norris. "The Clean Energy Revolution: Fighting Climate Change with Innovation." Foreign Affairs Mar.-Apr. 2016.
• Gaddy, Benjamin, Varun Sivaram, and Francis O'Sullivan. "Venture Capital and Cleantech: The Wrong Model for Energy Innovation." MIT Energy Institute, 2016.
• Gaddy, Benjamin, and Varun Sivaram. "Clean Energy Technology Investors Need Fresh Support after VC Losses." Financial Times 26 July 2016.
• Sivaram, Varun, and Shayle Kann. "Solar Power Needs a More Ambitious Cost Target." Nature Energy Nat. Energy 1.4 (2016): 16036
• Sivaram, Varun, Sam Stranks, and Henry J. Snaith. "Outshining Silicon." Scientific American 2015.
• Sivaram, Varun, Gireesh Shrimali, and Dan Reicher. "Reach for the Sun: How India's Audacious Solar Ambitions Could Make or Break Its Climate Commitments." Stanford University Steyer-Taylor Center on Energy Policy and Finance, 2015.
• Villaraigosa, Mayor Antonio R., Varun Sivaram, and Ron Nichols. "Powering Los Angeles with Renewable Energy." Nature Climate Change 3.9 (2013): 771-75.
• Sivaram, Varun, Edward J. W. Crossland, Tomas Leijtens, Nakita K. Noel, Jack Alexander-Webber, Pablo Docampo, and Henry J. Snaith. "Observation of Annealing-Induced Doping in TiO 2 Mesoporous Single Crystals for Use in Solid State Dye Sensitized Solar Cells." J. Phys. Chem. C The Journal of Physical Chemistry C 118.4 (2014): 1821-827.
• Sivaram, Varun, James Kirkpatrick, and Henry Snaith. "Critique of Charge Collection Efficiencies Calculated through Small Perturbation Measurements of Dye Sensitized Solar Cells." J. Appl. Phys. Journal of Applied Physics 113.6 (2013): 063709.
• Crossland, Edward J. W., Nakita Noel, Varun Sivaram, Tomas Leijtens, Jack A. Alexander-Webber, and Henry J. Snaith. "Mesoporous TiO2 Single Crystals Delivering Enhanced Mobility and Optoelectronic Device Performance." Nature 495.7440 (2013): 215-19.