Phoebe Koundouri (PhD Cambridge University) is full Professor in Economics and Econometrics and Director of Research Laboratory on Socio-Economic and Environmental Sustainability, Athens University of Economics and Business. She is also part-time Research Professor in Environmental Economics at the Department of Technology, Management and Economics, Technical University of Denmark co-leading the Climate and Energy Division of the Technology, Management and Economics Department. She is also Director of the Sustainable Development Unit at ATHENA Information Technologies Research Center.  Before her election at the Athens University of Economics and Business, she held academic positions at the University of Cambridge, University College London, University of Reading, London School of Economics. Prof. Koundouri holds MPhil and a PhD in Economics and Econometrics from the University of Cambridge. For her studies she received a full scholarship from the University of Cambridge and the Cambridge Commonwealth Trust.

She is widely recognized as a pioneer in innovative, human-centric, interdisciplinary systems for the sustainable interaction between nature, society, and the economy. She is included within the official Stanford University list of the Top 2 % of world scientists and she is listed in the 1% of  most-cited women economists in the world, with 15 published books  and more than 600 published peer reviewed scientific articles, more than 100 interdisciplinary research projects with competitive international research funding) with applications in over 120 countries around the world.

Prof. Koundouri is an academician, member of Academia Europae, member of the European Academy of Sciences and Arts,  member of Board of the Trustees of the World Academy of Art and Science (WAAS) ,  member of the European Academy of Sciences and Arts, member of the InterAcademy Partnership (IAP) , and member of the Nominating Committee for the Prize in Economics Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, The Royal Swedish Academy of Science.

In 2019, she was elected President of the European Association of Environmental and Resource Economists (EAERE), the biggest scientific association in the field, with more than 1500 member institutions, from more than 75 countries. In 2023, she was elected Chair of the World Council of Environmental Resource Economists Association (WCEREA) which includes the Asian Association of Environmental and Resource Economics (AAERE), the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists (AERE),  the African Association of Environmental and Resource Economists (AFAERE), the European Association of Environmental and Resource Economists (EAERE) and the Latin American Association of Environmental and Resource Economists (LAERE). In 2020 she received the prestigious European Research Council ERC Synergy Grant , entitled: “Smart Water Futures: Designing the Next Generation of Urban Drinking Water Systems”. Currently, this is the largest research project in the world on urban water systems. In 2023, Prof. Phoebe Koundouri has been awarded the Academy of Athens Excellence in Science Award 2023 for her contribution to the advancement of the Science of the Marine Environment. This Award, given every four years, constitutes the epitome of academic recognition in Greece.

Over the past three decades, he has received academic excellence awards including the  EAERE European Research Council Award, a number of awards for the best scientific publication from major scientific journals and conferences, scientific publication with the greatest impact on policy making, etc. She is also the head/editorial board member of more than 30 international scientific journals, has organized numerous international scientific conferences, supervised more than 30 PhD students and given keynote addresses and public lectures around the world.

Prof. Koundouri is chair of the SDSN Global Climate Hub, co-chair of SDSN Europe and SDSN Greece, while she is the founder and scientific chair  of the Alliance of Excellence for Research and Innovation on Aeiphoria (AE4RIA), an initiative for collaboration between (i) research institutions which she co-leads:  ReSEES: Research on Socio-Economic and Environmental Sustainability and Stochastic Modeling and Applications Laboratory at Athens University of Economics and Business, the Sustainable Development Unit (SD.U) at ATHENA Research Center) , (ii) Innovation Acceleration Hubs: SDSN Global Climate Hub, EIT Climate-KIC , BRIGAID-Connect: Technologies for Climate Adaptation, MENA Maritime Accelerator and Black Sea Accelerator and (iii) Associations and science-policy networks:  Sustainable Development Solutions Network, SDSN Europe, SDSN Greece, European Association of Environmental and Resource Economists, Nexus Cluster, Water Europe. AE4RIA involves more than 200 researchers (economists, mathematicians, statisticians, engineers, natural scientists, as well as experts from the social and human sciences) with the mission of shaping the necessary human-centered techno-economic transformation towards the joint implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals UN 2030 Agenda, the Paris Agreement on Climate Change and the European Green Deal. AE4RIA’s work has influenced the formulation of European and Global policies related to the management of natural resources, and the crises of climate change and ecosystem collapse.

Prof. Koundouri is one of the Commissioners of the prestigious Lancet Commission on COVID-19  for which she co-chairs the “Green Recovery” Task Force. She co-leads with Prof. Jeff Sachs (president of SDSN) the UN SDSN Senior Working Group on “Transformation Pathways for the implementation of EGD and the SDGs”. She is an invited member of the Program on Fraternal Economy of Integral and Sustainable Development of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences and member of the European Investment Bank Climate Leaders Network. She is also member of the National Climate Change Committee of Greece, of the Ministry of Energy and the Environment, was member of the 2021 Pissarides Committee (10 year Greek Development Plan) chaired by Nobelist Prof. C. Pissarides,  and IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change) EAERE delegate and European Climate Pact Ambassador for the European Commission.  Prof. Koundouri acts as a scientific advisor to the European Commission, World Bank, European Bank of Reconstruction and Development, OECD, UN, NATO, WHO, World Water Council and various other Multilateral Institutions, as well as numerous national and international foundations and organizations. She also advises national governments across the world.

Prof. Phoebe Koundouri, is a mathematical economists and econometrician by training, with 25 years of experience in interdisciplinary and intra-disciplinary large multi-partner research projects, focusing on developing innovative, human-centric, interdisciplinary systems for the sustainable interaction between nature, society, and the economy. Central to her research is the study of human decision-making processes over time and under uncertainty, and the understanding of how these processes translate into value for goods and services, which has important economic consequences. She is particularly interested in understanding the determinants of the total economic value (including use and passive values) of public goods and services, as well as the values of global externalities like climate change. Given that the value of public goods is not documented in any markets, her work focuses on inferring this value using experimental behavioural approaches. Moreover, time and uncertainty are correlated, while uncertainty often takes the form of ambiguity (when probabilities of uncertain events are unknown) so she is working on a unifying framework, which must be derived from a deeper understanding of the structure of human decision processes and the need to have a framework for short and long run decisions. She works mainly, but not exclusively, on microeconomic and econometric modelling and analysis, with applications to natural resources and climate change, sustainable development and the sustainability transition, sustainable finance, non-market valuation, long-run costs benefit analysis and relevant discounting issues, as well as interdisciplinary intradisciplinary approaches to natural resources management, and more recently philosophy of science for understanding human decision-making.

Phoebe Koundouri lives mainly in Greece (Athens) with her husband, Professor Nikitas Pittis, and their three daughters: Chrysilia, Billie and Athena.