Fabio Riva is Adjunct professor of “Sustainable Development” at Politecnico di Milano. He graduated with honours in Energy Engineering – Energy for Development at Politecnico di Milano, and he got the PhD in Energy and Nuclear Science and Technology at the Department of Energy with a thesis titled “Modelling endogenous complexities in rural electrification: on the local dynamics of growth and the planning of off-grid systems”.

He has been working as an energy researcher at the UNESCO Chair in Energy for Sustainable Development from 2014 and he has been one of the co-founders of the Sustainable Energy System Analysis and Modelling (SESAM) group. His research mainly deals with the following topics: sustainable rural energy planning; energy optimisation; modelling energy demand dynamics for remote and rural area of the world; appropriate technologies assessment; impact evaluation of energy systems in the cooperation field. He is an expert in System Dynamics-based modelling for energy and sustainability planning. His applications are especially focused on the analysis of rural short- and long-term electricity demand dynamics, with integrations in off-grid energy optimisation tools. He collaborated in Sustainable Energy Technologies for Food utilization (SET4food) project for strengthening the capacity of humanitarian actors in implementation and management of efficient and sustainable energy technologies in humanitarian contexts. In parallel, he carried out laboratory activities for testing and designing Improved Cook Stoves for developing countries.

From March 2015, he is also teaching assistant at Politecnico di Milano of the thermodynamic course “Fisica Tecnica” for the degree programme in energy and aerospace engineering at Politecnico di Milano. He is also a lecturer in the "Engineering and Cooperation for Development" course at Politecnico di Milano.