Faculty Spotlight: Sanya Carley

Dr. Sanya Carley joined the University of Pennsylvania in 2023, where she now serves as Vice Provost for Climate Science, Policy, and Action and the Presidential Distinguished Professor of Energy Policy and City Planning at the Weitzman School of Design. She also leads the Kleinman Center for Energy Policy as the Mark Alan Hughes Faculty Director and co-directs the Energy Justice Lab.

Her research and teaching focus on energy justice, just transitions, and the public perceptions of emerging energy technologies. Through her work, she examines the human costs of the energy transition and the systemic drivers of energy insecurity, recently launching the Utility Disconnection Dashboard to track national trends in energy access. She is the co-author of the 2025 book Power Lines: The Human Costs of American Energy in Transition.

Dr. Carley complements her research by serving in key national advisory roles, including as an author of the Fifth National Climate Assessment and a member of the National Academies' Roundtable on Macroeconomics and Climate-related Risks and Opportunities. She also serves as Vice President of the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management (APPAM).

Prior to her appointment at Penn, she was the Paul H. O’Neill Professor at Indiana University and held positions at the World Bank Group. At Weitzman, her work continues to bridge the gap between energy policy, urban planning, and social equity.

In your first months on the job, you’ve consulted widely across campus. Were there any surprising or inspiring insights from those conversations? How are they shaping the initiatives you’re prioritizing?

Indeed, in the first several months on the job, I, along with Executive Director Steve Decina, went on an extended listening tour across campus and beyond— and what a rewarding and inspiring tour it was! Despite already having a good understanding of the climate strengths here at Penn, I was genuinely surprised about just how deep and wide our climate expertise is, and in every single school, with so many accomplishments and curricular developments that aren’t yet being told to the broader community. Sharing and celebrating these stories is now one of our priorities in Penn Climate.

Another major priority for our office is to connect scholars from across the university through inter- and multi-disciplinary collaborations. We serve as a force multiplier, bringing our community together to extend and elevate the significant expertise we already have here at Penn.

You’ve described a three-pronged vision for Penn Climate: integration across the University, elevating existing initiatives, and making a global impact. Can you preview anything that we might see over the next year or two?

Absolutely— I hope that you see us everywhere over the next year! Starting this spring, there are already a lot of ways to get involved with our office. Join us at our launch event on April 20th and at our faculty mixer on May 6th. Check out our website now and again once it is fully launched in late April with a climate course list, faculty database, and more. Drop by our monthly faculty writing group sessions, join our extreme heat or data centers and climate working groups, attend one of our upcoming seminars (we’ll have Penn Vet Dean Andy Hoffman on April 15 and the Kleinman Center’s Heather Boushey on April 23), or scan our master climate events calendar to plan out your next lunch hour or evening.

In the coming weeks and months we’ll have even more ways to connect. Keep a close eye out for an open call for our Grand Climate Challenge Initiative, which we will release shortly. This program will support two projects per year for the next three years that involve multi-disciplinary teams integrating units from across campus that seek to tackle complex challenges with “grand” solutions.

Watch out also for a student fellows program call and a postdoc cohort call to come soon; scan our climate course list; or pop by the Penn bookstore to find a full display of recent faculty published climate books. This is what we’ve been up to, all before May. And we have a lot more programming planned for the rest of the year, including a presence at New York City’s Climate Week in September and Climate Week at Penn in October.

Can you share some of the details of new student programs coming – who they’re for (grad/undergrad/interdisciplinary) and when students can expect to apply?

Penn Climate will be launching several new student programs in the coming year that are open to both graduate and undergraduate students across disciplines. One of the main opportunities will be the Student Fellows program, which will include Climate Communications Fellows, Data Fellows, University Research Fellows, and Climate Solutions Hub Research Fellows working on climate-related research, communications, and data-driven projects across the University. Applications for the Student Fellows program will launch this summer, and students are encouraged to stay tuned for more details about timelines and opportunities through the Penn Climate newsletter and social media channels. Penn Climate will also introduce Student Climate Opportunity Grants beginning in the Fall 2026 semester. These grants will support conference travel and presentation costs, independent or faculty-advised research projects, and the planning and execution of Penn-based climate events. Students will also have the chance to get involved in a variety ways with Climate Week 2026, scheduled for October 5–9.

What are some of the ways Penn Climate will work with faculty across different schools to promote research collaborations and curriculum development?

A major part of our role as an office is to be the connector, or an integrator, across campus, as we articulate in our mission statement:

The mission of the Office of the Vice Provost for Climate Science, Policy, and Action (“Penn Climate”) is to drive climate scholarship and action from local to global scales, harnessing Penn’s formidable strengths across its 12 schools, health system, centers, and institutes to elevate climate work across campus and catalyze high-impact initiatives that position Penn as a premier hub for climate solutions. We will achieve this goal by integrating and elevating the work being done across the university, promoting inter- and transdisciplinary research and scholarship, and by focusing on the applied, practical impact of our work.

We will serve this integration role by directly connecting and convening faculty, staff, and students around certain topics, funding several grand climate challenge initiatives, and building external partnerships with thematically aligned Penn colleagues. Our work is guided by a desire to be highly inclusive and to have Penn Climate serve as a home to everyone.

You recently shared that you have a long-term goal for Penn to be recognized worldwide as a leader in climate matters. What do you see as the top priority?  How do you balance local and global initiatives?

We built a strategic vision around three keystones, which represent our top priorities. Keystone 1 focuses on student programming and curricular development. Keystone 2 focuses on faculty community and integration, as well as communications to make that stellar work more visible. Keystone 3 is what we have termed the “Climate Solutions Hub,” which includes both our Grand Climate Challenges Initiative and a Climate Response Collaborative. The latter is a program in which Penn faculty, staff, and students provide expert products and guidance to external stakeholders, seeking long-term partnerships through translational, trans-disciplinary work.

Across all three keystones, we seek to balance local and global by leaning into both. For example, we are working with a multi-disciplinary team to install both shade structures and air quality purifiers in local Philadelphia childcare facilities, while studying teacher awareness and project outcomes. In another project, we are partnering with the Vietnam Green Building Council to measure the impact of sustainable building solutions. Climate change is both a local and a global challenge, so it is essential that we embrace and integrate both.

Given recent shifts in federal climate research funding and policy uncertainty, how do you see Penn Climate adapting or responding to these broader external pressures? What role can research universities like Penn play in this landscape?

I think that a devotion to the climate effort is more important right now than ever, so we are doubling down in that regard. But you are right that the federal funding and policy environments are marked by significant uncertainty. This means that we need to be especially nimble in our efforts to fund our initiatives as well as in our research strategies. For example, we are working with faculty and others across the Penn community to help diversify our funding approaches, seeking greater foundation and private industry support and partnerships. Research-wise, we are leaning into initiatives that respond to pressing needs, including data center energy and water use and critical mineral developments.

I also personally think that the right approach is one that is solutions-oriented, rather than crisis-motivated. The latter can evoke feelings of powerlessness and fatigue. The former can help unite people in a mission and give our community a sense of hope and agency.

Research universities like Penn are uniquely positioned to play an important role in the present moment. We must continue to generate scientific knowledge and seek climate solutions. We must coordinate and collaborate with other universities to set priorities, and tackle grand climate challenges as a collective. And we must use our connections in our local communities to serve as an exemplar and partner, with an unwavering commitment to address climate challenges.

As an energy policy scholar with expertise in equity and just transitions, how do you see your own research integrating into Penn Climate, or even extending it?

My research focuses on decarbonization strategies, energy affordability, and human perceptions of and interactions with energy technologies. These topics are highly relevant to all our Penn Climate research initiatives and, given the policy, technology, behavioral, social, and economic elements of my research agenda, also align nicely with Penn Climate’s multi- and inter-disciplinary approach.

What are you most looking forward to in this role?

So very much! For the sake of brevity, however, I will highlight two things. First, I am very excited to forge partnerships across the university that wouldn’t have happened otherwise, and in meaningful ways that lead to climate solutions and action. Second, I am very much looking forward to launching one of our Climate Solutions Hub initiatives, the Climate Response Collaborative. This effort will help us develop external partnerships with governments, industry, and nonprofits, leveraging a strength of Penn’s: generating high impact and translational scholarship. All our work is rooted in Penn’s existing excellence, and these are just two examples of how poised Penn is to be universally recognized as a home for climate solutions.

What are you working on now in your research?

I recently co-authored a book, “Powerlines: The Human Costs of American Energy in Transition,” which tells the stories of front-line communities that bear the burdens of our energy systems and do not have access to the opportunities and benefits of the clean energy transition. As a complement to this body of work, along with colleagues, I have a series of projects that seek both policy and technical solutions to these energy challenges. Collaborators and I have a study that introduces a randomized controlled trial of weatherization and electrification in low-income, multi-family housing in the city of Cincinnati. In another randomized controlled trial, collaborators and I are building a digital platform and allocating energy utility bill assistance as a self-managed tool in a Midwestern state, with an objective to evaluate whether alternative allocation approaches meaningfully reduce energy insecurity and utility disconnections. Using the Utility Disconnection Dashboard, an online tool built by the Energy Justice Lab, which I co-direct, my team is conducting several studies on the role of regulatory disconnection protections and utility assistance programs, respectively, on disconnections and health outcomes; and the relationship between tree canopy, urban heat island, and disconnections. In another project, along with collaborators, I am studying how different community engagement practices affect solar siting outcomes.

Through all of this work, both in my lab and in Penn Climate, you can see that I'm really focused on action--how do we address the complex challenges of climate change, deeply understand it, and help get people and our planet to a better place. I'm fortunate to be in a position to help the whole Penn community contribute to these solutions.