Norberg-Bohm Fellowship Supports Research Curiosity

Harvard Kennedy School (HKS) doctoral student Daniel Velez Lopez is researching air pollution in Mexico and whether the country is willing to pay the costs to reduce it. HKS student Jennifer Kao is interviewing academics, investors, and government officials working to generate and commercialize clean energy innovations in the United Kingdom.

With support from the Belfer Center’s Vicki Norberg-Bohm Fellowship, Kao and Lopez are the most recent of 22 HKS doctoral students selected for the fellowship since 2006. The annual $7,000 awards allow students to investigate a wide range of research on energy and environmental issues before deciding on a dissertation topic. Recipients in past years have used the funds for fieldwork, internships, and other efforts to explore projects ranging from the testing of soil to promote energy efficient use of fertilizers to technology adoption in the midst of a civil conflict.The fellowship is a tribute to the late Vicki Norberg-Bohm, inaugural director of the Belfer Center’s Energy Technology Innovation Policy group (ETIP), whose work focused on understanding the process of technological change and the role of public policy for stimulating innovation. The Center’s Science, Technology, and Public Policy Program and Environment and Natural Resources Program co-sponsor the fellowship program.

“The Norberg-Bohm family’s support of the fellowship has provided a legacy of fostering innovation for sustainable development and careers for young scholars,” said Prof. William Clark, ENRP faculty chair.

Alicia Harley, a 2011 fellowship recipient who is now a Giorgio Ruffolo Doctoral Research Fellow in the Sustainability Science Program at HKS, said, “Having a Norberg-Bohm fellowship gave me the flexibility I needed to pursue research ideas on my own before I was able to articulate those ideas into coherent research proposals.” Exploring the state of Bihar in India, she said, “helped me hone my research interests around innovation and inequality.”

Gabe Chan, 2010 fellowship recipient and current ETIP research fellow at the Belfer Center, said “The biggest impact of the fellowship was the opportunity…to meet researchers working at some of the most interesting public, private, and non-profit institutions around the country and directly ask what the important and unanswered research questions were in my general research area. The Norberg-Bohm fellowship was the turning point for my dissertation research.”

See here for more on the Vicki Norberg-Bohm Fellowship and past recipients.