Kelly Sims Gallagher is a nonresident scholar in the Sustainability, Climate and Geopolitics Program at the Carnegie Endowment and is academic dean and professor of energy and environmental policy at the Fletcher School, Tufts University. She directs the Climate Policy Lab and the Center for International Environment and Resource Policy at Fletcher. The Climate Policy Lab is dedicated to identifying which climate policies work, which don’t, and why in countries around the world, with particular emphasis on major emerging economies, including China, India, Ethiopia, South Africa, Indonesia, Mexico, and Brazil. 

Gallagher served in the second term of the Obama administration as a senior policy advisor in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, and as senior China advisor in the Special Envoy for Climate Change office at the U.S. State Department.  

Gallagher is a member of the board of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University, serves on National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine’s Committee on Deep Decarbonization, and also serves on the board of Energy Foundation China. She is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Broadly, she focuses on energy innovation and climate policy. She specializes in how policy spurs the development and deployment of cleaner and more efficient energy technologies, domestically and internationally. She is the author of Titans of the Climate (The MIT Press 2018), The Global Diffusion of Clean Energy Technologies: Lessons from China (MIT Press 2014), China Shifts Gears: Automakers, Oil, Pollution, and Development (The MIT Press 2006), and many other articles and book chapters.