Biography
Gaston Gertner is a policy specialist and social scientist with expertise in behavioural science applications for public policy and impact evaluation of infrastructure projects. He combines international development and policy implementation experience with applied research across Latin America. His policy work and research agenda lies at the intersection of hard and soft policy approaches to infrastructure projects—ranging from designing programs to extend household connections to sewage networks to fostering energy-efficient behaviours in residential settings. After earning a Master in Public Affairs from Princeton University, he joined the Inter-American Development Bank, leading impact evaluations implementation in housing, water and sanitation, urban development, and social protection. Between 2021 and 2024, he served as Executive Director of the Center for Evidence-Based Policymaking at Universidad Torcuato Di Tella, expanding its research portfolio and building partnerships with IDB, UNICEF, USAID, and ILO.
More recently, his work has focused on energy efficiency and residential electrification, including the use of community-based energy audits to design and scale energy policies in informal settlements. He is the co-editor of Climate Change and Economic Growth: Lessons from Argentina (forthcoming in Springer Briefs in Latin American Studies, 2025) and contributed the chapter “From Disparity to Sustainability: The Journey of Energy Efficiency in Buenos Aires' Low-Income Neighborhoods” in Resilient Urbanism, recently published in 2025.
As a Policy Leader Fellow, his work will focus on developing policy frameworks to accelerate the transition to net zero-emission homes and commercial buildings. With an applied policy orientation, he will explore opportunities for enhancing sustainable business models and designing scalable strategies for replacing gas heating systems with modern electric systems (heat pumps, solar, smart meters) in urban neighborhoods. His project intends to guide the design of policy instruments and align incentives from governments, public utilities, the energy industry and investment funds to foster net zero solutions in the residential sector within the energy transition.