Ana Unruh Cohen has spent the last two decades working on U.S. federal climate and energy policy in Washington, DC. She was most recently the majority staff director of the House Select Committee on the Climates Crisis, which released a comprehensive Congressional climate action plan in June 2020 that set the stage for energy and climate provisions in the 2020 omnibus appropriations act, the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, the CHIPs and Science Act and the Inflation Reduction Act. Of the 715 recommendations in the plan, 314 became law and 438 passed the House of Representatives by the end of 2022.
Prior to joining the Select Committee staff, she was managing director of government affairs for the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) and the NRDC Action Fund. She served as the Director of Energy, Climate and Natural Resources for Senator Edward J. Markey (D-Massachusetts) for four years. In the U.S. House of Representatives, she served as the Deputy Staff Director of the Natural Resource Committee Democratic staff from 2011 to July of 2013 and as the Deputy Staff Director and Chief Scientist of the Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming from 2007 through 2010. Dr. Unruh Cohen was the first Director of Environmental Policy at the Center for American Progress, where she worked from end of 2004 to early 2007. She has also served as a legislative aide to then-Congressman Edward J. Markey, handling various issues pending before the Energy and Commerce Committee and the Natural Resources Committee. Dr. Unruh Cohen originally joined Congressman Markey’s staff as the 2001-2002 Science and Technology Policy Fellow sponsored by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Meteorological Society and the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research.
Dr. Unruh Cohen has a B.S. in chemistry from Trinity University and received her D.Phil. in Earth sciences from the University of Oxford, where she was a Rhodes Scholar and a NSF Graduate Research Fellowship recipient. Dr. Unruh Cohen’s husband is an aerospace engineer and they have a daughter.
