Ian Klaus is the founding director of Carnegie California. He is a leading scholar on the nexus of urbanization, geopolitics, and global challenges, with extensive experience as a practitioner of subnational diplomacy.

Ian has built and led a number of global research efforts focused on bringing localized knowledge into a cohesive whole. Most recently, he co-led and served as the series editor for the Summary for Urban Policymakers, and landmark report that distilled over 8,000 pages of IPCC science into eighty pages of accessible, policy relevant material for urban policymakers at the city, provincial, and national levels. The report was launched at the UNFCCC pavilion at COP27 with all six IPCC co-chairs and remains unique for the IPCC. 

As a practitioner, Ian has extensive experience advancing and implementing policy. He served as the deputy U.S. negotiator for Habitat 3, as senior adviser for global cities at the U.S.  State Department, and as a member of the Policy Planning Staff.  More recently, he helped lead the development of both the Urban 20 and Urban 7, the G20 and G7 urban-focused engagement groups. He served as an adviser to the National Intelligence Council on the urban elements of the most recent Global Trends report.

He was a senior fellow in global cities and a senior fellow in foreign policy at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. Ian has also been a member of the World Economic Forum's advisory board on the future of urban development, the Creative Cities Working Group at Stanford University, a visiting fellow at the University of Pennsylvania, and the Ernest May Fellow for history and security studies at the Kennedy School of Government. 

He is currently the chair of the advisory board for the Pattis Family Foundation Global Cities Book Award. He holds an MA from Oxford University, where he studied as a Rhodes Scholar, and a PhD in international history from Harvard University. He has published widely on the implications of urbanization for global challenges. In addition to academic journals, his writing has appeared in the Washington Post and frequently in Bloomberg. He is the author of The Belt and Road City (Yale, forthcoming in 2023 with co-author), Forging Capitalism (Yale, 2014), and Elvis is Titanic (Knopf, 2007).