Tim Ravis

Tim is a geographer, urban planner, occasional data scientist, and PhD candidate in Development Studies in the Department of Global Development at Cornell. His current research concerns energy transitions in Indonesia, examining how the state, science, finance, activists, and local residents come together to struggle over and construct new energy landscapes. He is particularly interested in geothermal energy, which is subsurface heat which can be used to generate constant supply of low-carbon, renewable electricity, and which abounds in Indonesia; the historical processes which structure contemporary energy transitions; and the relationship between urbanization and processes of agrarian change. In this work, he draws on political ecology, energy geographies, resource geographies, critical development studies, and spatial history. Before beginning his PhD, Tim studied urban planning at Harvard, was a summer fellow at the UN's data science lab in Jakarta, consulted for the World Bank, led the monitoring and evaluation team at the Indonesia Infrastructure Initiative, researched the politics of urban planning in Indonesia as a Fulbright scholar, and studied geography at the University of Connecticut. At Cornell, he is a Sage Dean's Excellence Scholar and has received the Cornell RANA Prize, an Einaudi Dissertation Proposal Development Program Fellowship, a Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowship, and a Fulbright-Hays dissertation research fellowship for Indonesia. Tim's hobbies include fiction, meditation, cycling, and motorbiking around Central Java.