Kasra Motlaghzadeh completes his PhD after 3.5 years of significant contributions to WatCISL research
Kasra has been a WatCISL member since 2022, during which he played an integral role in one of the lab's keystone projects: a Climate Action and Awareness Fund project entitled "Robust Decision Making Using Dynamic Adaptive Policy Pathways for Direct Air Capture Deployment in Canada."
Supervised by Professors Vanessa Schweizer and Keith Hipel, his PhD research focused on the role of CDR and direct air capture in Canada. Kasra's work, including his publications along the way, represent a significant contribution to the literature on CDR, decision-making under deep uncertainty, and cross-impact balance analysis.
Looking ahead to 2026, Kasra will be starting as a Research Fellow at the Cascade Institute, where he will be working on questions around just and fair energy transitions, primarily with the Scale-Up and Acceleration team, while also engaging with the Polycrisis program.
Learning doesn’t stop with a degree. If anything, thinking that we’ve “finished learning” is probably where the real problems begin.