Description
Dr. Mekala Krishnan is a partner at the McKinsey Global Institute (MGI), McKinsey’s business and economics research arm.
Her research focuses on topics related to sustainable and inclusive growth, including climate risk and the net-zero transition, globalization, productivity growth, and gender economics. Her most recent research focuses on the net-zero transition, adaptation and physical climate risk across sectors and geographies, including its implications for companies and countries. She is an author of the recent MGI reports, Advancing adaptation: Mapping costs from cooling to coastal defenses, The hard stuff: Navigating the physical realities of the energy transition, An affordable, reliable, competitive path to net zero, The net-zero transition: What it would cost, what it would bring, From poverty to empowerment: Raising the bar for sustainable and inclusive growth, and Climate risk and response: Physical hazards and socioeconomic impacts. Her past research has focused on the risks facing global value chains and the future of globalization.
Mekala is a frequent speaker on these topics at global conferences as well as with executives at Fortune 500 companies. She has authored numerous articles, and her work has been cited in leading business publications, including The Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Economist, and Harvard Business Review.
Mekala serves on advisory boards for the Massachusetts Office of Energy Transformation, the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce, and the Centre for Social and Economic Progress India. She is on the board of the Global Fund for Women, a leading public foundation dedicated to improving global gender equality. She has served on a Bretton Woods Committee working group on climate finance, on an advisory board for the Sibley School of Mechanical Engineering at Cornell University and was previously a member of a task force at the Hutchins Center on Fiscal and Monetary Policy at Brookings focused on improving productivity measurement.
Mekala received her Ph.D. and M.S. degrees in Mechanical Engineering from Cornell University in 2011. Prior to Cornell, she received a Bachelor of Technology degree in Mechanical Engineering in 2006 from the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi.
