Emanuela Colombo is an Italian energy expert, professor, researcher and scientific advisor. She is a full professor of the Department of Energy and the Rector's Delegate to Science Diplomacy, Cooperation and Development at the Polytechnic University of Milan (Politecnico di Milano) and an adjunct professor at the Nelson Mandela African Institution of Science and Technology. She is also the UNESCO Chair in Energy for Sustainable Development.
Early life and education Colombo has a master's degree (MSc) in Nuclear Engineering and a PhD in Energy Engineering, both from the Polytechnic University of Milan in Italy. Before academia, she worked for Ansaldo, ABB and Fluent Inc. (now part of Ansys).
Career Colombo joined academia in 2001. Her original interests were heat transfer for power generation, turbulence phenomenology, and modelling of computational fluid dynamics. She is now the coordinator and lead of the Sustainable Energy System Analysis and Modelling (SESAM) group at the Department of Energy in the Polytechnic University of Milan.
In 2005, Colombo was named Deputy of the Rector’s Delegate to Cooperation and Development at the Politecnico di Milano, a position she held until 2022. In 2011 she was named Rector’s Delegate for international relationships with Africa. In 2023 she became the Rector’s Delegate to Science Diplomacy.
Professor Colombo serves as a scientific coordinator of European projects and international proposals in green innovation (Egypt), sustainable energy engineering (Kenya, Tanzania, and Ethiopia), the nexus of water, food, and energy (Egypt), modern energy services in refugee camps (Lebanon, Somalia, the Central African Republic and Colombia) and capacity building in engineering (Tanzania).
She has been the UNESCO Chair in Energy for Sustainable Development since 2012.
African energy activism In an interview with The Guardian Nigeria in 2021, Colombo stated, "If Africa will not be provided with the affordable and reliable energy that its people deserve, no sustainable development may ever come to the continent. Moreover, in Africa, with special reference to some areas (like residential and industrial sectors) there is still much work that can be done toward efficiency in order to reduce the primary energy consumption and as a consequence current GHG emissions intensity in the continent."
In 2023, at a colloquium attended by representatives of the African Union and European Union, Colombo said that energy remains a crucial to development, especially in Africa.
In 2021 Emanuela Colombo hosted a virtual program organised by UNESCO titled "Energy – Development Nexus: Towards a People-Centred Approach." Colombo stated during the program that there is, "need for Africans to design or get involved in designing a tailored solution to the energy challenges on the continent."
Colombo is a member of the Advisory Board of Green Growth Africa. It is a non-profit, non-governmental organization that focuses on innovation, development, and implementation of ‘greened’ socio-economic development solutions that address Africa's development challenges on climate change, environmental sustainability and environmental education. It was founded by Dr. Adedoyin Adeleke, a co-chair of the United Nations Independent Group of Scientists.
Publications Professor Colombo has published over 200 scientific papers, out of which 120 are in Scopus with an h-index of 32. She was the primary author of the book "Renewable Energy for Unleashing Sustainable Development", published by Springer in 2013.
Some of her other publications include:
References