Rafia Zaman

Biography

Project: Integrated Assessment of Data Centers

Advisors: Susan Ostermann & Emily Grubert

As a Postdoctoral Research Fellow with the University of Notre Dame Just Transformations to Sustainability Initiative, Rafia Zaman contributes to an integrated assessment of data center growth in Indiana and the Midwest. Applying an environmental and resource governance lens, her work examines how this growth is governed and how benefits, costs, and risks related to electricity, water, land, housing, and local employment are distributed across host and neighboring communities. 

Rafia is an interdisciplinary policy researcher whose work sits at the intersection of sustainability policy, resource economics, political economy, and infrastructure governance. Her research examines how institutions, policies, and service-delivery systems shape resource access, reliability, affordability, and welfare outcomes for households, firms, farmers, and communities. Prior to joining Notre Dame, she was a Postdoctoral Associate at the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke University, where she worked on electricity access and reliability in Sierra Leone and groundwater irrigation governance in Bangladesh. Her dissertation investigated the distributional and market effects of sustainable electrification policies in rural Bangladesh. Methodologically, her work uses applied econometrics, non-market valuation, field experiments, survey research, and spatial analysis.

Rafia holds a PhD in Environmental Systems Sciences, with a focus on Sustainability and Innovation Management, from the University of Graz in Austria. She also holds an MBA from the Asian Institute of Technology in Thailand and a BBA from Khulna University in Bangladesh.