Priyanka Mohanty is the Executive Director of the United Auto Workers (UAW) Center for Manufacturing a Green Economy (CMGE) where she is building the organization that will lead the union’s recruitment and training for careers in climate manufacturing, empowering a well-trained green workforce to meet the growing needs of manufacturing operations created by the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (BIL), and the CHIPS Act.

Priyanka comes from 9 years in climate policy and activism. Prior to coming to CMGE, she was working as an Affiliate Scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab where she provided scholarship on the techno-economic, policy, regulatory, and socio-economic landscape related to energy transitions and climate workforce development across the power, transport, and industrial sectors in the United States and India.

Priyanka has also worked on policy areas surrounding a just climate transition at The California Governor’s Office of Planning and Research and the Socio-Spatial Climate Collaborative. She worked for many years with the New Climate Economy (NCE), a major international initiative housed within the World Resource Institute and governed by the Global Commission on the Economy and Climate. At NCE, she provided research support for their flagship 2018 global report “Unlocking the Inclusive Growth Story of the 21st Century: Accelerating Climate Action in Urgent Times”, authored briefings on climate finance for the 2018 G7 meetings, and managed the project’s country portfolios in China, India and Indonesia, working with government stakeholders in those countries to support a low-carbon development policy agenda.

She earned her Master of Science with UC Berkeley’s Energy and Resources Group (ERG). She grew up in Phoenix, but currently lives in Oakland.