Faculty

John P. Banks is a Practitioner-in-Residence at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS).

Jennifer Cole is concurrently on the faculty in the Harvard Graduate School of Sustainability, where she transferred to from Harvard's Earth and Planetary Sciences.

Jonas Nahm is Assistant Professor of Energy, Resources, and Environment at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. Jonas' research interests focus on the intersection of economic and industrial policy, energy policy, and environmental politics. In particular, he studies the role of the state in processes of industrial restructuring that accompany responses to climate change and clean energy transitions more broadly. His work utilizes clean energy transitions in China, Germany, and the United States to engage two debates in comparative political economy: (1) the role of the state in shaping the international division of labor in highly globalized industries, and (2) sources of state capacity in interest group politics during periods of industrial restructuring. His book manuscript, “Collaborative Advantage: Forging Green Industries in the New Global Economy”, uses the development of renewable energy sectors to investigate the political economy of innovation and industrial development in highly globalized industries. The book shows that new possibilities for collaboration among firms in the global economy have reinforced national patterns of industrial specialization. In the decades before international economic integration made it easier for firms from around the world to work together on tasks ranging from production to innovation, differences in national capitalisms yielded equally distinct national industrial specializations for production, innovation, and competitiveness. Globalization has since challenged the primacy of nation states by moving beyond their territorial reach many of the activities that now make up the global economy. However, as Jonas shows in the book, globalization not only continues to be mediated by domestic institutions, it also causes persistent and consequential divergence of such institutions and national industrial specializations over time. In addition to his work on renewable energy industries, Jonas has ongoing research projects on the politics of greening the global auto sector and the subnational determinants of climate policies. His research has been funded by the Minerva Research Initiative and the U.S. Army Research Office, the German National Academic Foundation, the World Bank Institute and the Korean Development Institute, the Horowitz Foundation for Social Policy, the Harvard Center for European Studies, the MIT Center for International Studies, and the Caroll Wilson Foundation. He was an MIT Energy Fellow and a Fellow of the German National Academic Foundation. Prior to coming to Johns Hopkins SAIS, Jonas was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University. He holds a PhD in Political Science from MIT and speaks German and Mandarin Chinese.

Johannes Urpelainen is the Prince Sultan bin Abdulaziz Professor of Energy, Resources and Environment at Johns Hopkins SAIS and the Founding Director of the Initiative for Sustainable Energy Policy (ISEP). He received his PhD in Political Science from the University of Michigan in 2009 and spent the next eight years at Columbia University. Johannes is the award-winning author of four books and over a hundred refereed articles on environmental politics, energy policy, and global governance. He teaches action-oriented classes on energy and environmental policy to equip the next generation of global leaders with deep knowledge, advanced analytical skills — and a passion for transformational social change. As one of the world’s top energy policy experts, Johannes frequently advises governments, international organizations, and the private sector on energy and environment. As the Founding Director of ISEP, Johannes is responsible for the vision, strategy, and general management of the initiative. His work under ISEP offers pragmatic but effective approaches to providing the world’s population with affordable and abundant energy at minimal environmental impact. In his spare time, Johannes reads biographies and tries to improve his Hindi.