Lauren Withycombe Keeler is an associate professor in the School for the Future of Innovation in Society at Arizona State University. She directs the Just Energy Transition Center and the Center for the Study of Futures in the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Futures Laboratory, and she co-chairs the undergraduate program in Foresight and Futures. Professor Keeler is both a futures scholar and practitioner. She uses scenarios, visioning and participatory games to help governments, utilities, companies and communities plan climate action and energy transitions that put community aspirations, justice and equity first.
Professor Keeler strives to have direct community and policy impact with her work. Since 2023 she has led the ASU team that wrote Arizona’s climate action plans for the Governor’s Office of Resiliency, supported by a $1 million planning grant for which she is principal investigator. These include the Clean Arizona Plan (2024) and the Comprehensive Climate Action Plan submitted to the U.S. EPA in December 2025. The work included statewide public engagement in English and Spanish. Earlier, she co-led development of Tempe’s first Climate Action Plan, which the City Council adopted in 2019.
A serial collaborator, she has helped secure more than $31 million in competitive funding with partners across ASU, within the CapaCities Network of City-University Partnerships in the US, Mexico, the UK, and Germany, which she co-founded in 2017, and with government and civil society organizations.
In coal-impacted towns including St. Johns, Joseph City and Holbrook, she has led community visioning that informs how the energy transition delivers local benefits. She is now a national voice on what data center development means for communities. In 2026 alone, she was featured on Science Friday, in a SciLine media briefing, on a panel at the AAAS Annual Meeting and in a dozen news outlets discussing the impact of data centers on neighboring communities and the role of community benefits agreements in sharing the benefits and reducing the burdens of data center development.
Her more than 25 peer-reviewed articles and book chapters have been cited over 7,400 times (h-index 20). Her co-authored key competencies framework, which grew out of her master’s research, is a widely used reference for designing sustainability degree programs. She has advised universities in the U.S., Europe and Mexico on building such programs. Her game Future Shocks and City Resilience has been played by city and tribal governments in three countries and three languages, and it won the 2019 Joseph Jaworski Next Generation Foresight Practitioners’ Award.
In the School for the Future of Innovation in Society Professor Keeler co-chair the undergraduate program in Futures and Foresight and teaches on futures and foresight methods. In 2023, she received the SFIS Excellence in Teaching Award for her work on redesigning the school's degree programs. She mentors Master's and PhD students in the Human and Social Dimensions of Science and Technology, Sustainable Energy, Global Technology and Development, and Innovation and Global Development programs. She holds a PhD and an MA in sustainability and a BA in Spanish from ASU. In her free time, she plays tennis and cheers on (and drives around) her three boys in their athletic and artistic endeavors.
