Director, Center for Climate Change and Sustainable Energy Policy, Central European University
Diana Ürge-Vorsatz is a Professor at the Department of Environmental Sciences and Policy, and Director of the Center for Climate Change and Sustainable Energy Policy (3CSEP) at the Central European University (CEU). She was elected as Vice Chair of Working Group III (Mitigation) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 2015. She holds a Ph.D. from the University of California (Los Angeles and Berkeley). She served as the Acting Head of Department at CEU in 2002-2003 and directed the PhD program in 2003 – 2004.
Diana Urge-Vorsatz was a Coordinating Lead Author in both the Fourth and Fifth Assessment Reports (AR4 and AR5) of the IPCC, contributed to the Synthesis Report of AR5, and was a lead author in its Special Report on Renewable Energy (SRREN). She served on the United Nation’s Scientific Expert Group on Climate Change, and led the buildings-related work in the Global Energy Assessment. Beyond having published widely in scholarly journals and book sections in relation to energy efficiency and sustainable energy policy, she is serving as the associate editor of the Springer journal “Energy Efficiency”, and is a member of the Editorial Board of “Annual Reviews of Environment and Resources”.
She has worked on and directed many international research projects for organisations including the European Commission, the European Parliament, the Global Environment Facility, United Nation’s Environment Programme, the World Energy Council, Climate Strategies, the World Bank. She was a Visiting Professor at the International Christian University of Tokyo and a Research Scholar at IIASA (International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis). She has been serving on the Governing and Advisory boards of several organizations, including Innogy (RWE), the Austrian Climate and Energy Fund (KLIEN), the European Climate Foundation (ECF), the UK Energy Research Centre (UKERC), and the Hungarian Energy-Efficiency Cofinancing Program (HEECP), and the energy giant Innogy. She is the Chair of the Scientific Advisory Board of the Clean Air Action Group. She is regularly invited to high-level review panels, such as that evaluating the Environmental Energy Technology Division of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory; the research of the EU’s Joint Research Centre during FP7, and the European Research Council. She appears regularly in the media related to energy and climate change issues. She received the Hungarian Republic’s Presidential Award “Medium Cross” in 2008, as well as the “Role Model” award in 2009.