Lee Schipper Memorial Scholarship for Sustainable Transport and Energy Efficiency
The “Lee Schipper Memorial Scholarship for Sustainable Transport and Energy Efficiency” targets supporting the momentum of Lee Schipper’s contribution to the enrichment of the international policy dialogue in the fields of sustainable transport and energy efficiency. Lee Schipper, international physicist, researcher, musician and co-founder of EMBARQ (today the Urban Mobility program of the World Resources Institute (WRI) Ross Center for Sustainable Cities) inspired and shaped the thinking of a generation of students and professionals. VREF support the Lee Schipper Memorial Scholarship since 2018.
2025 Call for Applications is open
Looking for an opportunity to catalyze sustainable, people-centered urban mobility? The Lee Schipper Memorial Scholarship wants to help you transform ideas into reality. Deadline for Applications is April 15, 2025.
The Schipper family, the Volvo Research and Education Foundations (VREF), and World Resources Institute’s Ross Center for Sustainable Cities are pleased to announce that applications are now open for the 2025 Lee Schipper Memorial Scholarship for Sustainable Transport and Energy Efficiency. The Scholarship, which is provided jointly by VREF, the World Resources Institute (WRI) and the Schipper Family, will award two extraordinary candidates up to US$10,000 each to advance transformative research in efficient and sustainable transport. In addition, a young researcher from Africa will be awarded an additional US$10,000 for the fifth consecutive year.
2024 scholars Tom Courtright, Nicholas Goedeking, and Olanike Babalola presented their research at the Transforming Transportation conference in March 2025.
About the Scholarship
The Scholarship aims to expand contributions to sustainable transport and energy efficiency research and policy dialogue. It prioritizes “iconoclastic” contributions that have clear, transformative outputs and contribute to measurable changes. Proposals relating to different aspects of policy dialogue are welcome, including data collection and quality, diagnosis through data analysis (qualitative and quantitative), policy analysis and evaluation, and interdisciplinary and international comparative analysis.
Who’s Eligible?
The scholarship is open to young researchers, defined as someone with five or fewer years of experience since their last academic degree (Master’s or Ph.D.) and who has not yet turned 36 years by the expression of interest submission deadline (born after April 15, 1989[1]). There are no geographic restrictions on scholarship applicants, so young researchers and students of all national origins and fields are eligible to apply. While applications should be submitted in English, research may be completed in other languages to enhance its impact.
Applications will be evaluated based on the following criteria:
- Consistency with Lee Schipper’s contributions
- Alignment with the idea of sustainable transport and energy efficiency
- Creation of innovative, transformational outcomes (“real impact”)
- Feasibility (timely, realistic)
- Applicant (affiliation, background, previous contributions, references)
Additional African Scholar Eligibility Requirements
The African Scholarship supports a young researcher from the African continent currently living and working in Africa. In addition to the global selection criteria above, applicants to the African Scholarship should also:
- Hold citizenship of an African country
- Currently live and work in Africa
- Be associated with an African-based institution (or an African branch of an international institution)
How to Apply (today!)
The Scholarship guidelines describe the scholarship application process in more detail. Please complete an expression of interest here by April 15, 2025. Up to seven candidates for each of the Global and African Scholarships will advance to the next selection round and be notified by the end of May 2025, when a more detailed research proposal will be required. The Scholarship Committee will aim to announce the final awardees in August 2025.
Guiding Webinar with Q&A – How to Apply
Contact
If you are interested in knowing more about the Scholarship, or if you have ideas that you would like to share with us, please send us an email to leeschipperscholarship@gmail.com
2024 awardees
Olanike Babalola was awarded for her research proposal “Multi-modal Freight Transportation Modelling in Metropolitan Lagos”, aimed at developing new multi-modal freight policy recommendations informed by the model outputs and a comparative review of freight policies in Nigeria and other countries.
Tom Courtright was awarded for his research proposal, “Boda Bodas in Kampala: Accessibility and Mis-Regulation” aimed o understand why residents of Kampala choose boda boda motorcycle taxis over other available modes and how under-regulation and for-profit actors have accelerated the growth of the boda boda industry in Uganda.
Nicholas Goedeking was awarded for his research proposal, “Alleviating Political Congestion: Fiscal Support Policies and Public Transit Development” , aimed to develop comparative historical case studies about the public transit investment policies implemented by the national governments of Colombia, Mexico and South Africa.
See list of all past scholars
Scholarship governance
Lee Schipper inspired and shaped the thinking of a generation
The following was adapted from an obituary written by Kirk R. Smith in Energy Policy
Lee Schipper was an international physicist, researcher and musician, who inspired and shaped the thinking of a generation of students and professionals. Lee was widely recognized for enriching policy dialogue with his passion for data and challenging conventional wisdom. Lee passed away in August 2011 after a brief and difficult battle with pancreatic cancer.
Highly productive career
Most recently, Lee was a senior research scientist at both University of California Berkeley’s Global Metropolitan Studies and at Stanford University’s Precourt Institute of Energy Efficiency conducting research and policy analysis on efficient energy use in transportation systems. He was co-founder of EMBARQ, the World Resources Institute’s Center for Sustainable Transport, and remained as a senior associate emeritus. Over a highly productive career, he worked at the Energy and Resources Group at UC Berkeley, Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, the International Energy Agency in Paris, Shell International in London, as well as being Fulbright Scholar at the Beijer Institute of Ecological Economics in Stockholm. He was a guest researcher at the World Bank, VVS Tekniska Foerening, the OECD Development Center, and the Stockholm Environment Institute.
Sharing the Nobel Peace Prize
Lee authored more than 100 technical papers and a number of books on energy economics and transportation, including Energy Efficiency and Human Activity: Past Trends, Future Prospects (1992) with Stephen Meyers, Richard Howarth, and Ruth Steiner. He served on the editorial boards of five major journals and was a member of the Swedish Board for Transportation and Communications Research. For four years he was a member of the U.S. National Academy of Science’s Transportation Research Board’s Committee on Sustainable Transport and Committee on Developing Countries. He worked in IPCC’s Mitigation group (WGIII), for the third and fourth assessments, thus sharing the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007.
Proponent of sensible policies
In Berkeley in the early 1970s, Professor John Holdren, President Obama’s Science Advisor, was the first person to hire Lee as an energy specialist. He notes that ‘‘Lee was one of the first people to point out that people don’t want to consume energy, but they want to consume energy services, like transportation, comfortable rooms, cold beer and so forth. And that there was an enormous variation in the amount of energy needed to perform those services.’’ Lee’s academic break came in 1976, between the first and second international oil shocks, when he published an influential paper in Science pointing out that Sweden consumed far less energy per unit of economic activity than the United States did. Lee shifted his primary attention to transport in the 1980s, becoming one of the premiere scholars in the field and a tireless proponent of sensible policies for public and private transport.
Master communicator
Lee was a force of nature—an irrepressible fountain of energy, insight, humor, and intelligence. And a master communicator. Part of this was being an irrepressible iconoclast with a wonderful knack of turning a phrase to excellent effect. He could make the basically dry subject of energy efficiency become exciting in ways that engaged students, the media, and policymakers. Evidence for this was publishing 15 letters to the editor in the New York Times on energy efficiency—a nearly legendary achievement. He was also kind, generous, and unselfish with his friends and students and with the grace and self-confidence to be curious and inquisitive about what others were doing.
Vibraphonist
Lee was multi-talented beyond his science. As a UC Berkeley student and vibraphonist, he led his jazz group to victory at the Notre Dame Jazz Festival in 1967. He would reprise the role as band leader with an ad hoc jazz group, Lee Schipper and the Mitigators, who performed primarily in conjunction with energy-related conferences. He was one of the world’s experts on Wilhelm Furtwangler, perhaps the greatest symphonic and operatic conductor of the 20th century, and collected one of the most complete sets of his recordings. Lee seemed to pick up languages effortlessly, speaking fluent Swedish, German, and French, and passable Norwegian, Danish, Spanish, and Portuguese. Even a bit of Russian.