Leela Velautham
Postdoctoral Researcher
Leela Velautham, originally from the UK, earned a combined Bachelor & Masters in Chemistry from Oxford University in 2013. She went on to earn an MA in Chemistry (2016) and a Ph.D. in Education in Maths, Science & Technology (2022) from UC Berkeley, where she worked with Prof. Michael Ranney on a variety of projects involving changing acceptance, beliefs and emotions regarding climate change. During her Ph.D., she was also a Carbon Neutrality Graduate Student Fellow and worked UC Berkeley’s Office of Sustainability on a variety of initiatives including managing the 2018-2021 campus greenhouse gas emissions inventory, updating GHG protocols for the calculation of various Scope 3 categories including waste, water and air travel, and helping to design and launch a business air travel mitigation pilot program for the campus. She is currently a postdoctoral associate working jointly with the MIT Climate and Sustainability Consortium and the MIT Office of Sustainability to characterize decarbonization pathways, net-zero targets, and identify common bottlenecks to achieving net-zero across both higher education and industry.