Burçin Ünel

Energy Policy Director, Institute for Policy Integrity

Dr. Burçin Ünel is the Energy Policy Director at the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University School of Law. She is an expert in utility regulation, and environmental and energy policy. Dr. Ünel has authored over 80 papers, policy briefs, public comments, and reports to improve the quality of governmental decisionmaking in numerous energy and environmental policy areas. Her articles on how to design policies for the future of the grid have been selected by the Environmental Law Institute as one of the year’s top five environmental law articles, each year from 2017 to 2019.She leads Policy Integrity’s stakeholder involvement both at the federal and state level in front of regulatory agencies such as public utility commissions and FERC. She also oversees Policy Integrity’s involvement in multiple carbon pricing initiatives around the country, both in energy market settings, such as in NYISO and PJM, and in cap-and- trade settings, such as RGGI, Transportation and Climate Initiative, and New York City’s Local Law 97. Her policy work in New York and California led to state utility commissions adopting more robust frameworks for valuing emissions, helping achieve the respective states’ goals of increasing clean energy and distributed energy resource deployment.Before joining Policy Integrity, Dr. Ünel held faculty positions at the Department of Pharmaceutical Outcomes and Policy at the University of Florida, and the Department of Economics at Bogaziçi University in Turkey. She also taught as an adjunct faculty member at the City College of New York and NYU’s Wagner Graduate School of Public Service. She received a B.A. in Economics from Bogaziçi University, and a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Florida.

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