Dr Ramit Debnath
- Associate Professor of AI and Sustainability
- Executive Director, Centre for Human-Inspired AI (CHIA)
- Fellow and Director of Studies in Design, Churchill College
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About
Dr Debnath has a background in electrical engineering and computational social sciences with an MPhil and PhD from Cambridge as a Gates Scholar.
Dr Ramit Debnath is the Executive Director of the Centre for Human-Inspired AI (CHIA) and an Associate Professor at the University of Cambridge. He is an elected member of the UK Government’s DWP Methods Advisor Group (MAG).
Ramit is the Founding Director of the Collective Intelligence & Design Group and the climaTRACES lab, working at the intersection of AI, energy, environment and society. Ramit is interested in solving global environmental challenges using human-centric AI and computational social sciences.
He also serves as the Assistant Director of the Energy Policy Research Group (EPRG) at the Cambridge Judge Business School. He is a Fellow and Director of Studies at Churchill College.
He has visiting academic roles at Caltech, co-leading the Climate and Social Intelligence Lab, and at Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability, co-leading the Stanford-Cambridge Inclusive Ordering Initiative.
Ramit has a background in electrical engineering and computational social sciences with an MPhil and PhD from Cambridge as a Gates Scholar.
Research
Research interests
- Human-in-the-loop AI for sustainability
- Computational social sciences for the environment
- Complex system design and decision-making
- Social tipping points
- Energy
- Environment
- Climate justice
Dr Debnath's award-winning research leverages human-centric AI, computational social science and systems thinking to understand global climate risks and their social tipping mechanisms for designing appropriate interventions. His research regularly appears in Nature and Science portfolio journals, top-field journals and leading AI conferences (like ICML, NeurIPS, FAccT). See: Google Scholar
His recent awards include Best Paper Award at ICML-2026, Seoul and Best Paper Honourable Mention at NeurIPS-2025, San Diego. Till date, Dr Debnath has received over £5M in sponsored research funding from government, industry and philanthropic donors. See: https://www.collectivedesign.group.cam.ac.uk/funded-projects
He serves as an Associate Editor for Energy Research and Social Science (Elsevier) and npj Climate Action (Nature Portfolio) and on the editorial board of Communications Sustainability (Nature), PLOS Global Public Health, iScience (Cell Press) and Humanities and Social Science Communications (Nature Portfolio).
Ramit serves as expert reviewer for UKRI, SNSF, EU Horizon, NSF (US) and NSF (Singapore). He loves cross-disciplinary collaborations and team-led research efforts. He plays an active role in mentoring young scholars and building a strong research culture in his group. https://www.collectivedesign.group.cam.ac.uk/our-people
Publications
Selected publications
Teaching and supervision
Module leader:
- DST0 Paper 1.5
- Math and Programming I Y2 DST1
- Artificial Intelligence and Design MAUS Research Methods MHAI
- AI for Sustainability