Jessica Jewell is a PhD student at Central European University where she is works on evaluating national energy security strategies and vulnerabilities of national energy systems. In addition to her studies, she is a contributing author to the Global Energy Assessment Energy Security knowledge module. She became interested in energy and environmental security while working as a geologist at a consulting Engineering firm in Washington DC. The incongruence between the high level political discussions about peak oil and energy imports and the highway development projects she was working on sparked her interest.

Before her current work in Energy and the Environment she graduated from Brown University with a degree in Geology and completed a year of graduate work in the same field at Pennsylvania State University. As a geologist, she had the opportunity to complete field work in places as varied as Kyrgysztan and California and work on continental-scale questions. Following her studies, she worked as a geologist at a consulting engineering firm in Washington D.C. While she enjoyed the technical aspects of her job, she became frustrated by the unsustainable nature of the projects she worked on and decided to leave her job to continue her education. She chose the Erasmus Mundus Masters program in Environmental Sciences Policy and Management which gave her the opportunity to continue studying global problems on a much shorter time scale which is arguably more relevant to policy-makers and societal decisions. During this time, she had the opportunity to study at Central European University, Lund University, and University of the Aegean.