Patricia Romero-Lankao
Patricia Romero-Lankao
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. Previously, she was a senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research. 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).
Romero-Lankao has extensive experience as a sociologist working across disciplines and at the science-policy interface in the United States, Mexico, and many urban locations internationally. Her leadership of international research has garnered a good deal of recognition—she served as co-leading author in a working group contributing to the Nobel Prize-winning Fourth Assessment Report published by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. She also serves on the editorial board of Earth’s Future and several other journals and on the steering committee of the U.S. Carbon Cycle Science Program.