Thomas Hertel

Distinguished Professor, Agricultural Economics, Purdue University Executive Director and Founder, Center for Global Trade Analysis

Areas of Expertise:

• Climate change impacts and mitigation

• Global land use change

• Global food security and environmental change

Thomas Hertel is Distinguished Professor of Agricultural Economics at Purdue University, where his research and teaching focus on international trade, climate change, food and environmental security. Dr. Hertel is a Fellow, and a Past-President, of the Agricultural and Applied Economics Association (AAEA). He is also a fellow of the AAAS (2018). Hertel is the founder and Executive Director of the Global Trade Analysis Project (GTAP) which now encompasses more than 15,000 researchers in 170 countries around the world (www.gtap.org). This Project maintains a global economic data base and an applied general equilibrium modeling framework which are documented in the book: Global Trade Analysis: Modeling and Applications, edited by Dr. Hertel, and published by Cambridge University Press. He has supervised more than forty PhD students and published more than 120 peer reviewed journal articles, along with several dozen book chapters as well as four books. Professor Hertel is the inaugural recipient of the Purdue University Research and Scholarship Distinction Award. He has also received a number of AAEA awards including: Publication of Enduring Quality, Distinguished Policy Contribution, Outstanding Journal Article and Quality of Communication. He has also been Advisor to two Outstanding AAEA PhD and MS theses.

Research Projects

FABLE

Students

Alla Golub | Jevgenijs Steinbuks

Brent Sohngen

Professor, The Ohio State University Department of Agricultural, Environmental, and Development Economics

Areas of Expertise:

• Natural Resource & Environmental Economics - Valuing environmental change
• Modeling land-use/land-cover change
• Timber market modeling
• Economics of non-point source pollution

Brent Sohngen is a professor of environmental and resource economics in the Department of Agricultural, Environmental and Development Economics at The Ohio State University. He also leads Ohio State’s Environmental Policy Initiative. Dr. Sohngen received his doctorate in environmental and resource economics from Yale University in 1996. He conducts research on the economics of land use change, the design of incentive mechanisms for water and carbon trading, carbon sequestration, and valuation of environmental resources. Dr. Sohngen developed a global forest and land use model that has been widely used to assess the implications of climate change on ecosystems and markets, and to assess the costs of carbon sequestration in forests, including reductions in deforestation. Dr. Sohngen has written or co-written 31 peer-reviewed journal articles, 45 monographs and book chapters. He co-authored sections of the 2001 and 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports, and he co-authored the forestry chapter of the most recent U.S. National Climate Assessment Report. Additionally, he has testified before the U.S. House of Representatives, Committee on Agriculture Subcommittee on Conservation, Credit, Energy and Research.  He teaches courses on “Food, Population and the Environment” and “Energy, the Environment, and the Economy”.

Recent Publications

Sedjo, Roger A., and Brent Sohngen. "The Effects of a Federal Tax Reform on the US Timber Sector." (2015).

Sedjo, Roger A., Brent Sohngen, and Anne Riddle. "Land Use Change, Carbon, And Bioenergy Reconsidered." Climate Change Economics 6.01 (2015): 1550002.

Kim, Sei Jin, et al. "THE IMPLICATIONS OF ENVIRONMENTAL POLICY ON NUTRIENT OUTPUTS IN AGRICULTURAL WATERSHEDS."

Sam Ori

Executive Director, EPIC

University of Chicago

Sam Ori is the Executive Director at the Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago (EPIC). From 2013 to 2015, he served as Executive Vice President at Securing America’s Future Energy (SAFE), a Washington, DC-based organization dedicated to reducing American oil dependence in order to enhance economic and national security. From 2007 to 2013, Sam led SAFE’s policy work on a variety of topics, ranging from global oil and natural gas markets to transportation technology. Prior to joining SAFE, Sam spent four years working in the federal government at the Broadcasting Board of Governors and Department of State, including at the U.S. Embassy in New Delhi, India.

Tess Russo

Assistant Professor, Penn State University

Researcher, RDCEP

Ph.D., University of California, Santa Cruz, 2012

Research Interests

• Hydrogeology
• Agricultural water management
• Managed recharge

Robert Jacob

Computational Climate Scientist, Mathematics and Computer Science Division, Argonne National Laboratory Fellow, Computation Institute, University of Chicago

Areas of Expertise:

• Coupled climate models
• Atmospheric science

Robert received his PhD in Atmospheric Science from the University Wisconsin at Madison. He also held post-doctoral positions in climate modeling at the University of Wisconsin at Madison and the University of Chicago.

Robert co-developed the Model Coupling Toolkit that is now the main infrastructure for the DOE/NSF Community Earth System Model.  He both develops software for climate modeling and applies the models to problems in climate change and climates of the past.

Early in his career, Robert developed the Fast Ocean Atmosphere Model, one of the first full global climate models to use parallel computing.  It is still used today for problems in past climates.  He currently leads the climate modeling group at Argonne and leads a project on improving the efficiency of climate model analysis.

Research Projects

Model fidelity | Climate Emulation | Precipitation Physics in Climate Models

Students

Laura Zamboni

Recent Publications

Y. Liu, Liu, Z., Zhang, S., Rong, X., Jacob, R. L., Wu, S., and Lu, F., “Ensemble-Based Parameter Estimation In A Coupled GCM Using The Adaptive Spatial Average Method”, Journal of Climate, vol. 27, no. 11, pp. 4002-4014, 2014.

S. Castruccio, McInerney, D. J., Stein, M. L., Liu, F., Jacob, R. L., and Moyer, E. J., “Statistical Emulation of Climate Model Projections Based on Precomputed GCM Runs”, 2013.

P. Balaprakash, Alexeev, Y., Mickelson, S. A., Leyffer, S., Jacob, R. L., and Craig, A. P., “Machine Learning based Load-Balancing for the CESM Climate Modeling Package”, Denver, CO, 2013.

R. L. Jacob, Krishna, J., Xu, X., Tautges, T. J., Grindeanu, I., Latham, R., Peterson, K., Bochev, P., Haley, M.,Brown, D., Brownrigg, R., Shea, D., Huang, W., and Middleton, D. E., “ParNCL and ParGAL: Data Parallel Tools for Post-Processing of Large-Scale Earth Science Data”, in International Conference on Computational Science (ICCS 2013), Barcelona, Spain, 2013, vol. 18, pp. 1245–1254.

V. Rao Kotamarthi

Atmospheric Scientist and Manager, Climate Research Section, Environmental Science Division

Argonne National Laboratory

Areas of Expertise:

• Spatial and temporal evolution of greenhouse gases and aerosols
• Development and evaluation of climate models
• Global and regional scale models of aerosols and atmospheric chemistry

Kotamarthi has over 20 years of experience in modeling and analysis of atmospheric chemical and physical process. He spent five years as a research scientist at AER, Inc., Cambridge, Massachusetts, before joining Argonne National Laboratory in November 1996.

His current research interests are in developing coupled models for regional scale climate studies; new approaches for using sparse, point observations related to climate for model evaluation; developing process-scale models of aerosols and their impact on climate; developing methods for model inversion and data assimilation into atmospheric trace gas models; ensemble kalman filter methods and adjoint models for trace and aerosol data assimilation; biogeochemical models and carbon storage changes from shifts in land use patterns; and integrated models for climate assessments. He is also the lead PI of an international and multi-institutional field study funded by DOE to generate a reference data set to evaluate the aerosol-cloud interactions over the Ganges valley region of India.

Recent Publications

Wang, Jiali, F. N. U. Swati, Michael L. Stein, and V. Rao Kotamarthi. "Model performance in spatiotemporal patterns of precipitation: New methods for identifying value added by a regional climate model." Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres 120, no. 4 (2015): 1239-1259.

Grant, Shanique L., Myoungwoo Kim, Peng Lin, Kevin C. Crist, Saikat Ghosh, and V. Rao Kotamarthi. "A simulation study of atmospheric mercury and its deposition in the Great Lakes." Atmospheric Environment 94 (2014): 164-172.

Riojas, Juanita, Hayder Abdul-Razzak, and Rao Kotamarthi. "Analyzing Mexico City's Air Quality Data to Better Understand the Sources, Sinks, and Chemical Modification of Black Carbon Aerosols." International Journal of Climate Change: Impacts & Responses 3, no. 1 (2012).

Hao Zhang

Department Head, Professor of Statistics, Professor of Forestry and Natural Resources

Research Interests:

• Asymptotics
• Environmetrics
• Risks and Insurance
• Spatial Statistics
• Statistical Computing
• Time Series Analysis

My current research is primarily in the analysis of spatial and space-time data. These kinds of data are being observed in many fields such as climatology, geophysics, geology, natural resources, agriculture, health sciences, economics and marketing. Technological advances have made it feasible to collect and archive space-time data at large scales that were not possible in just a decade ago. These massive and correlated data create challenging and interesting statistical problems, and demand innovative computational and methodological research.

Tanu Malik

Fellow, Computation Institute, University of Chicago

Tanu's research is in the area of database systems, focusing on challenges in big data analytics and metadata management. Her current research is focused on data provenance, design of scientific dataspaces, and evaluation of systems for data-intensive computing. Tanu has worked with scientists from several domains: astronomers, chemical engineers, geoscientists and cosmologists, and contributed novel methods and technologies to their data lifecycle.

She has a PhD and Masters in Computer Science from Johns Hopkins University and a Bachelor's degree in Civil Engineering from Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur.

Nathan Matteson

Assistant Professor, School of Cinematic Arts, DePaul University

Computation Institute

Areas of Expertise:

• Design
• Interactive Media

Nathan is an Assistant Professor in the School of Design’s Graphic Design department. He received his BFA from the University of Tennessee and his MFA from the University of Chicago. He has been teaching and working in Chicago since 1999. His work pointedly ignores commonly accepted boundaries amongst disciplines. Currently he is obsessed with computational methods of typeface generation and letterform modification. He is also a founding member of the product design collaboration Obstructures, and works with the Computation Institute at the University of Chicago designing and building web application interfaces for datasets and mathematical models.

 

Raffaele Montella

Assistant Professor, University of Naples Parthenope

Argonne National Laboratory

Areas of Expertise:

• Environmental Modeling
• Grid Computing
• Cloud Computing

Dr. Raffaele Montella works as assistant professor, with tenure, in Computer Science at Department of Science and Technologies, University of Naples “Parthenope”, Italy since 2005. He got his degree (MSc equivalent) in (Marine) Environmental Science at the University of Naples “Parthenope” in 1998 defending a thesis about the “Development of a GIS system for marine applications” scoring with laude and an award mention to his study career. He defended his PhD thesis about “Environmental modeling and Grid Computing techniques” earning the PhD in Marine Science and Engineering at the University of Naples “Federico II”.
The research main topics and the scientific production are focused on tools for high performance computing, such as grid, cloud and GPUs with applications in the field of computational environmental science leveraging on his experiences in embedded/mobile/wearable/pervasive computing and internet of things. He joined the CI/RDCEP of the University of Chicago as Visiting Scholar and as Visiting Assistant Professor working on the FACE-IT project.

Research Projects

FACE-IT

Todd Munson

Co-PI, RDCEP 1 (2010-2015)

Scientist, Mathematics and Computer Science Division, Argonne National Laboratory

Fellow, Computation Institute, University of Chicago

Areas of Expertise:

• Algorithms for numerical optimization and equilibrium problems
• Applications of mathematical programming
• Linear algebra for large sparse systems

Munson's primary research focus is algorithms and applications of optimization and complementarity. He has worked on several generalized Newton methods for solving complementarity problems, including PATH, the most widely used software for solving these problems, and parallel semi-smooth methods in TAO, the Toolkit for Advanced Optimization. He has also worked on special-purpose algorithms for solving support vector machines and mesh shape-quality optimization problems and is currently developing methods for structured optimization problems such as those encountered in PDE-constrained optimization and economics.

Munson has been involved in a number of projects that make computational tools available to researchers. For example, NEOS (Network Enabled Optimization System) is a multi-institutional project that provides access to over fifty solvers of academic and commercial optimization packages through an assortment of Internet interfaces. NEOS processes over 400,000 job requests annually from academic, commercial, and government institutions.

Munson received his PhD in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin at Madison.

Research Projects

CIM-EARTH | MagPIE

Students

Theo Kulczycki

Former Students and Postdoctoral Scholars

Sou-Cheng Choi | Aman Chitkara | Santiago Munoz

Andrew Poppick

Assistant Professor, Department of Statistics, Carleton College

Poppick’s research pertains to climate variability, changes thereof, and simulating transient climates, with a focus on statistical methods for non-stationary processes. He received a PhD in the Department of Statistics at the University of Chicago, from which he also received a BA in statistics.

Raymond Pierrehumbert

Louis Block Professor, Department of the Geophysical Sciences

University of Chicago

Areas of Expertise:

• Climate change, climate simulation
• Mars: Climate

Pierrehumbert studies the physics of climate, especially regarding the long-term evolution of the climates of Earth and Mars. Previously, he directed the Climate Systems Center, which was established with a $3.6 million grant from the National Science Foundation to develop software for rapidly conducting advanced climate simulations. Pierrehumbert was an author of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's Third Assessment Report (1997-2001). He also was a member of the National Research Council's Panel on Abrupt Climate Change and its Societal Impacts (2000-2001), and currently serves on the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Panel on abrupt change. Pierrehumbert was a John Simon Guggenheim Fellow in 1996-1997.

Research Projects

Social cost of carbon

Alan Sanstad

Senior Researcher, Computation Institute, University of Chicago

Affiliate Staff Scientist, Environmental Energy Technologies Division, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

Affiliate Researcher, Energy & Resources Group, University of California – Berkeley

Areas of Expertise:

• Economics and policy analysis
• Energy efficiency and greenhouse gas mitigation

Alan H. Sanstad is a Staff Scientist in the Environmental Energy Technologies Division at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Dr. Sanstad received the A.B. degree in Applied Mathematics, and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Operations Research, from the University of California at Berkeley. Dr. Sanstad’s research and publications have included work on the economics and policy analysis of end-use energy efficiency, technological change in energy-economic simulation modeling, and integrated assessment of global climate change. His recent work has focused on developing new approaches to long-run quantitative modeling and decision-making under uncertainty pertaining to energy system transitions, large-scale greenhouse gas abatement, and other issues in the energy, environmental, and technology policy arenas. Dr. Sanstad has also worked with the U. S. Environmental Protection Agency, the California Energy Commission, the U. S. Department of Energy, and non-governmental organizations in developing and implementing research strategies, policies, and projects on energy, greenhouse gas mitigation, and related topics, and has taught in Berkeley’s Graduate Group in Energy & Resources

Research Projects

Robustness in Economic Models with Climate Change | Model uncertainty and energy technology

Former Students

Mark Woolley

Leonard Smith

Professor of Statistics, London School of Economics

Visiting Professor, Department of Statistics, University of Chicago

Areas of Expertise:

• Theory of nonlinear dynamical systems: Indistinguishable states, model estimation and system analysis
• Construction and evaluation of ensemble forecasting systems of actual systems
• Forecast interpretation for decision support in energy, insurance and other sectors on weather, seasonal and climate timescales

Smith serves as the Director of the Centre for the Analysis of Time Series (CATS) at the London School of Economics. Smith received his bachelor’s degree from the University of Florida and PhD in Physics from Columbia University.

He has held visiting or fixed term research positions at Cambridge (UK), École Normale Superior (France), Warwick (UK) and Potsdam University (Germany). Since 1992 he has been a Senior Research Fellow (mathematics) at Pembroke College and Research Associate, Mathematics Institute, University of Oxford, (UK), and also became a Professor of Statistics (Research) at the London School of Economics (LSE) in October 2004.

Smith has held grants funded by many bodies including ONR (US Office of Naval Research) and NOAA (US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) as well as from Australia, the European Commission and the UK Research Councils. Smith was active in the formation of strategy for THORPEX (he was co-author of the Socio-Economic Impacts Chapter) and the original experimental design(s) of climateprediction.net.

His interest in the public understanding of science led to a Selby Fellowship from the Australian Academy of Sciences. In recognition of his contributions to mathematically-coherent, user-relevant developments in meteorology, the Royal Meteorological Society awarded Professor Smith its Fitzroy Prize in 2003.

Research Projects

Model Evaluation and Fidelity | Shadowing

Former Students and Postdoctoral Scholars 

Hailiang Du | Ana Lopez

Michael Stein

Ralph and Mary Otis Isham Professor, Department of Statistics

College Master, Physical Sciences Collegiate Division

University of Chicago

Areas of Expertise:

• Spatial-temporal processes
• Statistical approaches to processing large environmental data

Stein graduated from MIT in 1980 with a B.S. in mathematics and received his M.S. and Ph.D. in statistics from Stanford in 1982 and 1984. After spending a year at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, he joined the faculty at the University of Chicago, where he is now the Ralph and Mary Otis Isham Professor of Statistics. He was chairman of the department from 1998 to 2001.

Most of Stein's research has been in the area of spatial statistics and its applications to environmental sciences and astrophysics. He was the director of CISES (Center for Integrating Statistical and Environmental Science), funded by the Environmental Protection Agency.

Updates to my profile:

Research Projects

Climate variability | Climate emulation | Climate model fidelity | Climate variability: statistics and observation based simulations| Precipitation characteristics: Present and future | Climate extremes | Temperature quantiles

Students and Postdoctoral Scholars

Chen Chen | Matz Haugen
 

Former Students and Postdoctoral Scholars

Bill Leeds | Stefano Castruccio | Feifei Crouch | Grant Wilder | Won Chang | Whitney Huang | Jingyu Bao | Andrew Poppick | Mark He | Aidan Sadowski

Jevgenijs Steinbuks

Economist

Development Research Group

World Bank

Areas of Expertise:

• Global land use modeling
• Energy demand and efficiency
• Applied computational economics and econometrics

Steinbuks is a research associate in the Center for Global Trade Analysis at Purdue University, the home of the Global Trade Analysis Project (GTAP), where he currently works on an optimal allocation of global land use under uncertainty and irreversibility constraints. His other research interests include the economic analysis of energy and climate policies, energy efficiency, inter-fuel substitution, renewable energy and the electric power. Steinbuks has an extensive experience in a variety of applied computational and econometric methods.

Before joining the Center for Global Trade Analysis, he was a researcher at the Electricity Policy Research Group, University of Cambridge, and served as a consultant to the World Bank. Steinbuks received his PhD in Economics from the George Washington University in 2008.

Research Projects

FABLE

David Weisbach

Walter J. Blum Professor, the Law School, University of Chicago

Director, Law & Economics Program, University of Chicago

Areas of Expertise:

• Entitlements
• Law and Economics
• Tax Law

Weisbach received his Bachelor of Science in mathematics from the University of Michigan in 1985; a Certificate for Advanced Studies in Mathematics from Wolfson College, Cambridge, in 1986; and a JD from Harvard Law School in 1989. After graduating from law school, Weisbach clerked for Judge Joel M. Flaum of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit and worked as an associate in the law firm of Miller & Chevalier. In 1992 Weisbach joined the Department of Treasury where he worked as an attorney-advisor in the Office of the Tax Legislative Counsel and, subsequently, as associate tax legislative counsel. In 1996 Weisbach was appointed Associate Professor of Law at Georgetown Law Center and joined the Chicago faculty in 1998.

Research Projects

Trade and Carbon Taxes | Endogenous Technical Change in IAMs | Social cost of carbon and methane | Chicago Climate Online | webDICE | Optimal Timing of Energy Transition

Students

Adriana Ciccone | Misung Ahn | Jillian Durkin | Katrina Lewis

Former Students

Jeremy Klavans | Mark Woolley | Federico Simon | Aidan Sadowski | Hsin-Yi Chen | Matt Gee | Runnan Yang | Jeremy Archer

Victor Zhorin

Research Scientist

Computation Institute

University of Chicago and Argonne National Laboratory

Victor V. Zhorin began his work as a theoretical physicist and an associate professor working on developing first principles quantum-mechanics foundations for a new class of infrared laser materials with mixed type of chemical bonding. Those materials were proven to be of importance for applications in laser communication, femtosecond and microchip laser design.

He was invited by the Argonne National Laboratory (DOE) to work on estimation of long-term radiation damage effects in high-level nuclear waste forms. Research showed that self-healing processes in solid-state matrix partially offset the structural damage around radioactive centers.

Recently, he is involved in economics research to analyze the role of financial systems in developing economies by using advanced structural models of economic growth with financial sector and occupation choice.

Research Projects

Robustness in Economic Models with Climate Change | Climate Variability: Model Comparisons

Laura Zamboni

Research Scientist

Computation Institute

University of Chicago and Argonne National Laboratory

My main research interest is the understanding of rainfall variability from seasonal to longer time scale. I am also interested in improving the characterization of rainfall variability and extreme weather events target to "real life applications" as for example energy and agricultural demands, and human health. The means to achieve such understanding include observational datasets as well as climate models, including the investigation of single processes affecting the simulated climate.

Currently, I am working on the uncertainty quantification of simulated rainfall due to uncertainties in the representation physical processes governing cloud formation and evolution. These physical processes occur at spatial and temporal scales not resolved by general circulation atmospheric models (AGCMs) and are a major source of uncertainty in explorations of natural climate variability, seasonal predictions and climate change assessments.

I am at present analyzing a large ensemble of present-day AMIP-type perturbed physics experiments I generated using the Geophysical Fluid Dynamic Laboratory (GFDL) High Resolution Atmospheric Model (HiRAM) on the Argonne Leadership Computational Facility. Simulations are performed over the entire globe at 100 Km resolution, which is outstandingly high for this type of studies. 

The project is conducted in collaboration with R. Jacob (ANL), R. V. Kotamarthi (ANL) and T. Williams (ANL), Maria Cadeddu (ANL), I. Held (GFDL), M. Zhao (GFDL), D. Neelin, and J. McWilliams (UCLA).

Two secondary projects focus on South American climate: The first project's goal is to investigate the interannual and inter-decadal variability of precipitation in South America and their relationship to ENSO flavors. The analysis is based on examination of atmospheric and coupled general circulation models, as well as observations. The second project's goal is to characterize heat waves in South America and their link to the general circulation.

Research Projects

Precipitation Physics in Climate Models