Varun Sivaram

Dr. Varun Sivaram was a Founding Board Advisor to Aventurine Partners prior to joining the Administration of Joseph R. Biden, where he currently serves as Senior Advisor to U.S. Special Presidential Envoy for Climate John Kerry and Senior Director for Clean Energy & Innovation. Varun is a physicist, bestselling author, and clean energy technology expert with experience spanning the corporate, policy, and academic sectors – most recently as Chief Technology Officer of ReNew Power Limited, India’s largest renewable energy firm. He has also served as a senior research scholar at the Columbia University Center for Global Energy Policy and was formerly fellow and director of the energy program at the Council on Foreign Relations, senior energy advisor to the Los Angeles Mayor and New York Governor’s office, adjunct professor at Georgetown University, and consultant at McKinsey & Co. He served on the advisory boards of the Stanford University Precourt Institute for Energy and the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment, as a senior fellow at the Aspen Institute and the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, and as a senior advisor to Camus Energy and Radia, Inc. TIME Magazine named him to its TIME 100 Next list of the next hundred most influential people in the world, and MIT Technology Review named him one of its top 35 innovators. His books include “Taming the Sun: Innovations to Harness Solar Energy and Power the Planet” (MIT Press, 2018) and “Digital Decarbonization: Promoting Digital Innovations to Advance Clean Energy Systems” (CFR Press, 2018). A Rhodes and Truman Scholar, he holds a Ph.D. in condensed matter physics from Oxford University and undergraduate degrees from Stanford University.