Scientific advisory panel

Johan is a Research Leader at SEI. Prior to this role he was Centre Director for the SEI centre in York from 1997-2012, Policy Director from 2013-19 and joined SEI in 1989. Before that he was part of the Beijer Institute, and has been at the University of York, at which the SEI York centre is housed, since 1986. He is a member of the Scientific Advisory Panel of the Climate and Clean Air Coalition (CCAC).

Chandra Venkataraman is the Shobha Dixit Chair Professor at the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay. Dr. Venkataraman was the Founding Convener (2012-2018) of the Interdisciplinary Programme in Climate Studies, a first such doctoral programme in India. She coordinates the 22-institution COALESCE network (Carbonaceous Aerosol Emissions, Source Apportionment and Climate Impacts) towards understanding the carbonaceous aerosol life cycle, climate impacts and climate feedback to air quality in the Indian region. Her research focuses on the intersection of technology and emissions, climate science, air pollution and environmental sustainability policy. Dr. Venkataraman’s research has contributed over 100 peer-reviewed publications, a book and four patents. She has mentored students to academic and R&D positions worldwide and worked on institutional systems to support the advancement of women faculty and students in STEM.

Gabrielle Dreyfus is chief scientist at the Institute for Governance & Sustainable Development (IGSD), Washington, DC and Paris, and an adjunct professor at Georgetown University. She joined IGSD in 2017 after nearly a decade of working at the science and policy interface with the US Department of Energy, rising to deputy director for the Office of International Climate and Clean Energy, and previously with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and US Senate. In addition to dozens of scientific and technical publications, Dr. Dreyfus worked as the lead coordinating author on a synthesis report by the International Energy Agency and United Nations Environment Programme on the intersection of energy efficiency and the phasedown of hydrofluorocarbons in the cooling sector. Dr. Dreyfus joined the Scientific Advisory Panel of the Climate and Clean Air Coalition in 2022 and served as a member of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine Committee on Development of a Framework for Evaluating Global Greenhouse Gas Emissions Information for Decision Making. She is also a member of the Montreal Protocol’s Technology and Economic Assessment Panel and was a member of the technical review committee of the Global Cooling Prize. She also contributed to the design and implementation of the $50 million Kigali Cooling Efficiency Program (now Clean Cooling Collaborative), a philanthropic collaboration housed at the ClimateWorks Foundation. She was a 2021 Honoree of Environment+Energy Leader 100. Dr. Dreyfus holds a B.A. in Earth and Planetary Sciences from Harvard University, and a masters and Ph.D. from Princeton University and Sorbonne Université in Geosciences.

Sophie Szopa is an atmospheric chemist at the Laboratoire des Sciences du Climat et de l’Environnement. She uses numerical models to study how chemistry intervenes in the modification of the composition of the atmosphere and how this affects climate and air quality. She carried out work on these various current environmental issues, before becoming interested in the role of this chemistry in the distant past of the Earth. She has been involved in the assessment of knowledge of the physical bases of climate change for the IPCC (AR6) and coordinated a chapter on short-lived chemical compounds acting on the climate. She participated in the drafting of the Summary for Policymakers of this report and its approval by governments. She is currently vice-president of the University Paris-Saclay, in charge of the sustainable development.

Eric Zusman is a senior policy researcher/area leader at the Institute for Global Environmental Studies in Hayama, Japan. Dr. Zusman holds a bachelors degree in Mandarin Chinese from Rutgers University, a dual Masters Degree in public policy and Asian studies from the University of Texas at Austin and a Ph.D. in political science from the University of California, Los Angeles. For much of the past two decades he has conducted research on environmental issues in Asia. This has included working with China’s Yellow River Conservancy Commission, the Chinese Research Academy on Environmental Science, Woodrow Wilson Center’s China Environment Forum as well as Taiwan’s Academia Sinica. He has published books and articles on water scarcity, air pollution regulation, environmental law, multilevel governance, sustainability transitions, low carbon development and the Sustainable Development Goals. He is currently serving as a lead author for the sixth assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (Chapter 17).

N’Datchoh E. TOURE is a researcher at the Laboratoire des Sciences de la Matière, de l'Environnement et de l'Énergie Solaire (LASMES) of the Université Félix Houphouët-Boigny (UFHB) in Côte d’Ivoire. She completed her Ph.D. in 2015 from the Federal University of Technology Akure (FUTA) in Nigeria. Her Ph.D. work focused on the West African aerosols and their climate impacts within the framework of West African Science Service Centre on Climate Change and Adapted Land Use (WASCAL) and International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP) Sandwich Training Educational Programme (STEP) scholarships. Following her graduation, she earned a postdoctoral position in Laboratoire d’Aerologie of Toulouse (France) where she worked on climate modeling and investigating uncertainties in African biomass emission inventories and atmospheric pollution impact on human health. Her team research in LASMES focuses on air pollution and its impacts on climate, weather, and human health in the West African region. Within this team, she focuses on aerosols and their impacts, as well as climate change. She has co-authored about twenty peer-reviewed articles published in international climate journals. She is contributing as coordinating lead author African Assessment of Air Pollution and Climate Change. She is also a member of the implementation team of the African Group on Atmospheric Sciences (ANGA), an International Global Atmospheric Chemistry (IGAC) working group.

Dr. Graciela B. Raga, born in Argentina, did her undergraduate studies in meteorology at the Universidad de Buenos Aires and received a PhD in Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Washington (USA) in 1989. Postdoctoral work at Environment Canada and at the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology (UK) gave her opportunities to develop research on cloud-aerosol interactions through in-situ measurements with research aircraft. She has been a scientist and professor at UNAM since 1995, having authored 76 peer-reviewed publications and several chapters in books, and supervised 16 master and PhD theses. Her research in Mexico focused more on aerosol urban pollution, providing a new direction by bringing a physical context to the pollution research. She has developed several graduate level courses and has taught systematically over the last 20 years. She has been a member of several international committees including the International Global Atmospheric Chemistry (IGAC), International Commission of Clouds and Precipitation (ICCP), Aerosol-Cloud-Precipitation-Climate (ACPC) Initiative of the International Global Biosphere Programme (IGBP) and a membe of the Joint Scietific Committee of the World Research Climate Programme (WCRP). She was the Chief Editor of the journal Atmosfera, a member of the Mexico Academy of Sciences, of the National System of Research (SNI, level III) of the National Research Council of Mexico (CONACYT) and of the Third World Organization for Women in Science. She is currently a Senior Associate of the International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP). She was Lead Author for Working Group I of the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change (IPCC), including participation in the Summary for Policy Makers and the Technical Summary of the Assessment. Recently, she co-chaired the Regional Assessment on SLCP in Latin America and the Caribbean, whose Summary for Decision Makers was presented at the UNEA meeting in 2016. She is also a member of the Committee to Prevent Extreme Climate Change (CPECC), chaired by Drs. Ramanathan, D. Zaelke and M. Molina.

Victor Alderson Professor of Applied Ocean Sciences and director of the Center for Atmospheric Sciences at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California, San Diego (USA). Professor Ramanathan has been conducting original research in Climate and Atmospheric Science since the 1970s. He discovered the super greenhouse effect of halo carbons (CFCs) in 1975 and used observations to quantify the large global warming effect of black carbon. He led international field campaigns, developed unmanned aircraft platforms for tracking brown cloud pollution worldwide, and educates and trains the next generation of scientists. Based on his research, he developed a new approach for mitigating climate change that involves mitigating emissions of four short-lived climate pollutants (SLCPs) to drastically reduce near-term warming and slowing down the retreat of the Himalayan glaciers. He is now implementing this new approach in the field. Professor Ramanathan conducted work on observations and modeling of SLCPs, particularly black carbon in Asia. He founded, designed, and leads Project Surya, an extended effort to characterize and mitigate environmental impacts of black carbon, ozone, and methane in rural India. He also initiated ICAMP, a World Bank sponsored project to reduce soot emissions from the transportation sector in India. Involved in research on mitigation strategies and has published on technical and policy options for SLCP reduction.

Dr. Molina is one of the world's leading researchers in atmospheric chemistry. He co-authored, together with FS Rowland in 1974, the original article predicting the thinning of the ozone layer as a result of the emission of certain industrial gases, chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), which won them the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. In addition, his research and publications on the subject led to the Montreal Protocol of the United Nations, the first international treaty that has effectively faced an environmental problem of global scale and of anthropogenic origin.