Paasha Mahdavi
Assistant Professor of Political Science, University of California Santa Barbara

Paasha Mahdavi is an assistant professor of political science at UCSB. His research broadly explores the political consequences of natural resource wealth, including extractive resource nationalization; the effects of oil-to-cash transfers on civic engagement; the political economy of fossil fuel subsidy reform; and the efficacy of policies to eliminate natural gas flaring.

His work has been published in journals such as Energy Policy, Nature Energy, and World Politics. Mahdavi is also an affiliated assistant professor in the department of government at Georgetown and currently serves as the GFC Fellow for the Council on the Future of Energy at the World Economic Forum. In a past life, Mahdavi worked as an energy consultant for ICF International. He earned his BA in economics from Columbia University, MA in international policy from Stanford University, and MS in statistics and PhD in political science from UCLA.