Senior Research Scientist, National Renewable Energy Laboratory
Dr. Patricia “Paty” Romero-Lankao joined NREL’s Center for Integrated Mobility Sciences in 2018 as a senior research scientist in joint appointment with the University of Chicago’s Mansueto Institute for Urban Innovation, where she is a research fellow. Throughout her career, she has developed a considerable body of highly regarded sociological and transdisciplinary research resulting in several research grants and some 135 peer-reviewed publications.
Her work primarily focuses on crucial intersections among energy and water systems, mobility, and the built environment in cities around the world. She has developed many innovative methods (e.g., clustering techniques and indices) to examine how inequalities in income, education, and decision-making power across populations relate to the distribution of benefits or negative impacts associated with access to transportation, energy, and related technological innovations (e.g., distributional injustice).
She has also developed elicitation tools (e.g., focus groups, fuzzy cognitive maps) to examine the energy and mobility needs of women, elders, the working class, people of color, and other underrepresented groups to inform understanding and management of these needs (e.g., procedural justice).
She has extensive experience as a sociologist working across disciplines and at the science-policy interface in USA, Mexico, and internationally. She was co-leading author to Working Group II of the Nobel prize-winning IPCC 4th Report.