Sudatta Ray is the Technical Director of Clean Energy Economics at the WRI Polsky Center for the Global Energy Transition. She is responsible for building the Center's portfolio of research in energy economics across the identified priority areas.

Sudatta joined WRI in 2026 after working in climate and energy policy across universities, governments, not-for profits and think-tanks spanning India, Singapore and the US. Most recently, she was a tenure-track Assistant Professor in the Geography Department at the National University of Singapore (NUS), with a joint appointment in the Environmental Studies Division at Yale-NUS College. Sudatta's training across physical and social sciences allows her to adopt a systems-wide lens to clean energy policy research. Her previous research ranged from understanding how current approaches to increasing energy access may be impeding income enhancing opportunities of recently electrified communities, to creating frameworks for decisions on future groundwater expansion and the role energy policies play in enabling groundwater access for irrigation and drinking water supply.

Sudatta received her PhD from Stanford University in Environment and Resources in 2021 and a master's in public policy from Carnegie Mellon on a Fulbright Scholarship. She also holds Bachelors and master's in chemistry from Delhi University in India. Sudatta is based in the Hague.