Ezgi Canpolat

Ezgi Canpolat is a 2026–27 Millennium fellow and a global leader in just energy and climate transitions and human-centered AI, working to ensure that the defining transitions of our time—first energy and climate, now AI—reshape economies and societies in ways that benefit the people most affected by them. An anthropologist and systems innovator, she leads the Social Dimensions of Climate Change portfolio at the World Bank across Eastern and Southern Africa. She has also advised governments across Africa and Southeast Asia and mobilized financing to ensure energy and climate transitions reach women, Indigenous peoples, and historically excluded groups. Canpolat now brings that same lens to AI, where she designs and evaluates real-world AI deployments—from AI coaching for early-childhood teachers in Zambia to multilingual tools for mining-affected communities—and authors the responsible-AI governance frameworks behind them. Earlier, she co-led inclusive programming at the Climate Investment Funds and co-founded the first global initiative for women-led coal transitions. In 2025, she launched Just Transitions Labs, a nonprofit pioneering justice-driven finance and governance tools for energy and AI transitions. A 2025 Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio fellow and visiting scholar at Harvard, she co-led research on the political economy of energy transitions in the Middle East. She holds a PhD in anthropology from CUNY and studied innovation and AI at Harvard Business School and MIT. Her first book, Governing Diversity (forthcoming from Bloomsbury Press), develops new methods for understanding how people form attitudes amid disruptive change.