Kathleen Araújo 

Professor of Sustainable Energy Systems, Innovation, and Policy; Director, Energy Policy Institute, Boise State University

Kathleen Araújo is the director of the CAES Energy Policy Institute and professor of Sustainable Energy Systems, Innovation & Policy at Boise State University. She specializes in decision-making, strategic planning, and policy associated with energy transitions and resilience. This includes social and technical aspects of low carbon management, as well as the resilience of critical energy infrastructure in extreme weather events.

Araújo’s research contributes to the advancing field of energy transitions. Her book, Low Carbon Energy Transitions: Turning Points in National Policy and Innovation (Oxford University Press, 2017), examines the social and technical history of four country-level changes following the 1973 oil crisis. Her edited volume, the Routledge Handbook of Energy Transitions  (Routledge, 2023) distills the state of current knowledge on energy transitions. Her broader base of work centers on tradeoffs in sustainability, regional diversification and factors shaping emerging adoption (e.g., hydrogen), community-informed decision-making, critical mineral security, and the role of skills/infrastructure repurposing. Araújo is the PI for a new DOE consortium centered on consent-based siting of spent nuclear fuel, and is a lead for a $24 million NSF award to evaluate energy-water system resilience. In 2023, Araújo was named a Presidential Innovator at Boise State University. Araújo earned her PhD from MIT and completed post-doctoral research on international nuclear safety and science-technology policy at Harvard. She consults for industry and inter-governmental organizations.