Janelle Knox-Haynes

Janelle Knox-Hayes is the Lister Brothers Associate Professor of Economic Geography and Planning in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She holds a visiting research fellowship at the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment at the University of Oxford. Knox-Hayes earned her Bachelor of Arts degree summa cum laude in International Affairs, Ecology, and Japanese Language and Civilizations from the University of Colorado Boulder in 2004. She obtained her Master of Science degree with distinction in Nature, Society, and Environmental Policy from the University of Oxford in 2006 and her Doctor of Philosophy in Geography and the Environment, with a focus on Economic Geography and Environmental Finance, in 2009. Prior to graduate school, she worked as an energy analyst for the United States Government Accountability Office in 2005, and during her studies, she served as an energy analyst for New Energy Finance in 2006.

Knox-Hayes joined MIT in 2015, following her tenure as Assistant Professor of Environmental Policy in the School of Public Policy at the Georgia Institute of Technology from 2009 to 2015 and as Senior Visiting Research Associate at Oxford's School of Geography and the Environment from 2009 to 2013. Her research examines the political economy of environmental management, including the governance of social and environmental systems under globalization's shifting spatial and temporal scales, the interface of financial markets and environmental systems, and decision-making amid socio-economic uncertainty. She investigates how social and cultural values shape sustainable development, with fieldwork in the United States, Europe, Asia-Pacific, and Iceland on Arctic sustainability. Among her awards are the SSRC Abe Fellowship for environmental finance in the Asia-Pacific, Fulbright Fellowship for sustainable decision-making in Iceland, Georgia Tech Class of 1969 Teaching Scholar in 2010, and Truman National Security Fellowship in 2009. She serves as editor of the Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society and directs the Resilient Communities Lab. Key publications include 'The time and space of materiality in organizations and the natural environment' (Organization & Environment, 2013), 'Understanding attitudes toward energy security: results of a cross-national survey' (Global Environmental Change, 2013), 'The politics of carbon disclosure as climate governance' (Strategic Organization, 2011), and 'The developing carbon financial service industry: expertise, adaptation and complementarity in London and New York' (Journal of Economic Geography, 2009).

Professional Email: jankh@mit.edu