Speakers
Weila Gong is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow with the Belfer Center’s Environment and Natural Resources Program and the Science, Technology, and Public Policy Program at Harvard Kennedy School. Her research explores comparative climate and environmental policy and politics, with a focus on China’s low-carbon energy transition, low-carbon cities, and greening the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). At the Belfer Center, her research investigates paths towards deep decarbonization in China, with a special focus on China’s just coal transition and on the energy transition in Inner Mongolia.
Gong’s dissertation and book project, “Low-Carbon Policy Experimentation in Chinese Cities: Leadership, Resources, and Implementation Strategies,” examines why some Chinese cities are doing better than others in initiating and implementing low-carbon policy experiments. Her work has appeared in the journal China Quarterly.
Previously, Gong was a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Science, Technology and International Affairs Program at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service and a visiting Predoctoral Fellow at the Brookings-Tsinghua Center. Gong holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from the Technical University of Munich’s School of Governance. She also holds a Master’s degree in International Relations and a Bachelor’s degree in History from Sun Yat-sen University, China.
Joanna Lewis is Provost’s Distinguished Associate Professor of Energy and Environment and Director of the Science, Technology and International Affairs Program (STIA) at Georgetown University's Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service. She has two decades of experience working on international climate and clean energy policy with a focus on China. At Georgetown she runs the Clean Energy and Climate Research Group and leads several dialogues facilitating U.S.-China climate change engagement. Lewis is also a faculty affiliate in the China Energy Group at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. She is the author of the award-winning book Green Innovation in China, and was a Lead Author of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Fifth Assessment Report. Lewis has worked for a number of governmental and non-governmental organizations including the Pew Center on Global Climate Change, the Asia Society and the White House Council on Environmental Quality, and has been a visiting scholar at Tsinghua University, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and the East-West Center. Her research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and the Center for Security and Emerging Technologies, among others. Lewis holds a Master’s and Ph.D. in Energy and Resources from the University of California, Berkeley and a Bachelor’s degree in Environmental Science and Policy from Duke University.
