Yael Borofsky
Early-Career Fellow 2023–2024

Yael Borofsky (born 1987 in Philadelphia, PA, United States) is a development economist and urban planner. Her research focuses on access to basic infrastructure, especially electricity services, in informal settlements. From sensors to participatory mapping, she aims to use transdisciplinary data collection methods so that residents of informal settlements can more directly shape the research, see their own neighborhoods from a new perspective, and use the information to achieve community development goals.

Yael received her PhD in 2022 from ETH Zurich. In her doctoral thesis, she worked on an inter- and transdisciplinary randomized impact evaluation of public streetlighting in an informal settlement in Cape Town, South Africa. Before joining the Collegium, she was a postdoctoral researcher and research manager in the Development Economics Group at ETH Zurich (2022–2023). She is a co-founding editor of the ETH Zurich Energy Blog and a founding member of the LightUp Collective.