Sarah Marie Jordaan

Dr. Sarah Jordaan's research is aimed at uncovering the environmental and economic trade-offs related to energy decisions, particularly those trade-offs related to the life cycle of energy technologies. Her expertise covers the intersection of science, technology, and policy, resulting in publications that focus on not only life cycle assessment but also more broadly on technology assessment, energy policy, and innovation. 

Her former students, research associates, and postdoctoral fellows come from a broad spectrum of academic disciplines ranging from engineering to business, economics, and political science. Her courses are aimed towards educating students from all of these disciplines and enabling them to tackle the toughest problems in energy and environment using defensible approaches. Her students and scholars have carried on to advanced academic education, government, and industry.

Prior to joining Johns Hopkins SAIS, Dr. Jordaan was an Assistant Professor of Energy Policy and Politics at the University of Calgary. There, she supervised graduate students in completing their degrees in either political science or sustainable energy. She taught both undergraduate and graduate courses in political science and engineering. She has also supervised graduate students from Lehigh's Energy Systems Engineering program. She seeks to bridge disciplinary knowledge for students and prepare them to take on challenges in decision-making regardless of whether they want a career in academia, industry, the public sector, or working for a non-profit.

Professor Jordaan has over a decade of experience researching energy and the environment with award winning publications on climate policy and the water implications of energy technologies. Her foundations in government and public policy were strengthened at Harvard University with the Energy Technology Innovation Policy research group at the Kennedy School of Government and she gained greater insight into climate science at the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences. She has held positions with the Electric Power Research Institute, Shell Canada, the Laboratory on International Law and Regulation at the University of California, San Diego, and the Ocean Sciences Center at the Memorial University of Newfoundland. She earned her PhD in 2010 at the University of Calgary in Environmental Design at the Institute for Sustainable Energy, Economy, and Environment. Her Bachelor's degree is in Physics with a minor in Computer Science from Memorial University.