Zakia Soomauroo is a researcher in the Research Unit Off-Grid Systems at RLI since August 2022. She is interested in a just transport transition, local community engagement and the sector coupling of mobility and energy systems.

Moreover, Zakia is a Ph.D. candidate at the Chair of Sustainable Economics of Human Settlements at Technical University of Berlin. She was awarded a doctoral stipend from the Reiner Lemoine Foundation and started with her research on decaarbonization pathways of the transport sector on small islands states in 2018 in a cooperation with the Mercator Research Institute on Global Commons and Climate Change.
In particular, she looks at how institutional changes, infrastructure investments and policies can be most effectively implemented in order to achieve the global sustainable development goals. At RLI, she supports the planning and modelling of future mobility scenarios and in project acquisition.

Zakia holds an undergraduate degree in Law and Economics from Touro College, SUNY and a graduate degree in Industrial and Network Economics from TU Berlin. Prior to her doctoral studies, Zakia spent four years at the VDI/VDE-IT in Berlin with a focus on the technical and legislative governance of the electric mobility roll out at a Pan-European level.