Nicoletta Brazzola

Nicoletta joined the Climate Policy Group as a PhD candidate in November 2020, funded through a Swiss National Science Foundation’s Doc.CHgrant. She is also affiliated with the ISTP’s Carbon Removal Lab. Her research interests lie in the socio-political and economic aspects of the diffusion of carbon removal technologies, and in her PhD research she is assessing different policy pathways to mobilize Direct Air Capture. Nicoletta is also co-leading the CDR Policy Instruments working group of the Swiss CDR Platform. 

Nicoletta holds a Master’s degree in Environmental Systems Science from ETH Zurich, where she majored in atmosphere and climate science. Her thesis, which was awarded an ETH Medal for outstanding Master’s thesis, explored the role of carbon removal for hard-to-abate emissions from agriculture and aviation. She further holds a Bachelor’s degree in Environmental Science from the University of Tübingen.

Prior to ETH, Nicoletta carried out research at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center in Maryland, U.S., where she collaborated on NASA’s Blue Carbon Monitoring project, at the University of Tübingen, and at the Leibniz Institute for Freshwater Ecology in Berlin, Germany. Nicoletta also worked and published for the United Nations Development Programme hubin Istanbul, Turkey.