Edward Cunningham, Advisory Council Member

Edward Cunningham is the Director of the Harvard Kennedy School Asia Energy and Sustainability Initiative and Assistant Professor at Boston University’s Department of Earth and Environment. He is also an affiliate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.I.T.) Industrial Performance Center and serves as a consultant to private and publicly listed companies, with a particular focus on the energy and financial sectors.

Professor Cunningham served as the program officer of the China Public Policy Program at the Harvard Kennedy School, which has trained over 1,000 senior government officials in China since 1999. He worked in Beijing, studied at Peking University, and speaks regularly at industry and academic conferences on issues relating to energy investment, industrial policy, competitiveness, and governance. While at M.I.T., he participated in two major industry studies. The first project, a five-year “Globalization Study” of international competitiveness and corporate strategy, examined over 500 leading companies and led to the publication How We Compete (Doubleday, 2005). The second project, a three-year study of the global coal market, leading energy technologies, and the political economy of energy investment, resulted in the report The Future of Coal (M.I.T., 2007). His work has also appeared in major media such as The New York Times, The New Yorker, and The Economist.

Edward received a B.S. from Georgetown University, an A.M. from Harvard University, and his Ph.D. from M.I.T. He was selected as a Fulbright Fellow to China, during which time he conducted his doctoral fieldwork as a visiting fellow at Tsinghua University. He is fluent in Mandarin and Italian, and focuses his work on energy markets, policy, and technology.