Deepti Chatti is an Assistant Professor of Climate Justice at the University of California, San Diego in Urban Studies and Planning, and Critical Gender Studies. Deepti’s scholarship centers the social equity challenges that undergird sustainable development projects in the Global South. An engineer turned ethnographer and critical scholar, Deepti draws on her interdisciplinary training to analyze clean energy access and exposures to air pollution in historically marginalized communities in India and the United States. Deepti has several ongoing projects in collaboration with communities directly affected by tenuous energy access and climate change impacts. In India, her work has focused on analyzing clean cooking energy access in rural low-income communities in collaboration with NGOs in different states in North and South India; in the US, her work has focused on the entangled issues of wildfires, outdoor air pollution, and the connection to the electrical grid in collaboration with Native Tribes and energy engineers in Northern California. D
eepti is currently working on a book project focused on clean cooking household energy transitions which attempt to abolish the ubiquitous mud stove (mitti ka chulha) from the kitchens of rural India for a variety of health, environmental, and social reasons. This research is based on long-term multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork in the Indian Himalayas with cooks and families, and with interviews with cookstove engineers, designers, air pollution researchers, non-governmental organizations, and government policy makers. The book also draws on several years of ethnographic study and participation in a randomized control trial in two states in India to generate knowledge about poverty and climate change through field-based experiments. Deepti’s scholarship contributes to feminist science and technology studies, political ecology, environmental studies, energy geographies, and South Asian studies. Deepti received her PhD and MPhil in Environmental Studies from Yale University with a certificate in Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies, an MS in Environmental Engineering and Science from Stanford University, and a BE in Civil Engineering from Osmania University. Prior to her current work in academia, Deepti worked for several years in public policy research in India, and as an engineer in California helping cities and counties plan for and design public infrastructure. For more information on Deepti’s research, teaching, and publications, please visit https://www.deeptichatti.com/.