Luisa Palacios
Adjunct Professor of International and Public Affairs
Personal Details
Dr. Luisa Palacios is Managing Director of Emerging Markets Energy Transition Financing and Development at the Center on Global Energy Policy. She comes to the center after a multidisciplinary career in the intersection of energy, finance, and policy. In 2019, she was appointed as the first Chairwoman of Houston-based Citgo Petroleum Corporation. During her two-year tenure on Citgo's board of directors, she led the company during a critical period in its history, as it faced significant geopolitical, financial, operational, and legal challenges. Palacios also led efforts to strengthen corporate governance, ethics, and social responsibility, including the publication of the company’s first-ever ESG report.
Before her time at Citgo, Palacios was a Senior Managing Director and member of the management committee of Medley Global Advisors, a macro policy research firm. She headed Medley’s Latin America’s economic and energy practice and later the firm’s emerging market research efforts. She previously worked at Barclays Capital as a Director in the emerging markets research department in New York, and as an economist in the risk department at Société Générale in Paris. She also worked as a senior economist at the Japan Bank for International Cooperation and was a consultant in the Office of the Chief Economist for Latin America at the World Bank in Washington, D.C.
She graduated from Universidad Católica Andrés Bello in Caracas, Venezuela; received a master’s degree in international affairs from Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs; and obtained a Ph.D. in international affairs from The John Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies where she wrote her dissertation on Latin America’s national oil companies. Dr. Palacios is co-head of the ESG working group at the Center on Global Energy Policy, is part of the Editorial Board of the Americas Quarterly, member of the Venezuela Working Group of The Atlantic Council, affiliated faculty at the Institute for Latin American Studies at Columbia University and International Faculty of IESA's School of Management.
In The Media
Luisa Palacios, managing director of energy transition finance at the Center on Global Energy Policy and the former chairwoman of the Citgo Petroleum Corporation, joined a a panel of experts to make sense of the new world order ushered in by President Trump’s “Donroe Doctrine.”
As Rubio described, there are also obstacles in Venezuelan law and in how the state-owned oil company PDVSA is managed that would need to be resolved — which could be challenging as long as Rodríguez, a former PDVSA official, remains in power, said Luisa Palacios, managing director of energy transition finance at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy and an ex-chair of the refining company Citgo, which was previously owned by Venezuela.
“Venezuela is the country that has seen the most expropriation cases brought against it. This means the starting risk premium there is very high,” said Luisa Palacios, the former Citgo executive who is now interim director of research and managing director of energy transition finance at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy.
Senior research scholars and fellows Luisa Palacios, Richard Nephew, and Daniel Sternoff from the Center on Global Energy Policy shared their thoughts on the energy-related implications of this development.
The country could see a relatively rapid recovery of some oil production, depending on the leadership that emerges, writes Luisa Palacios,