Katrina Lewis

MPP Candidate, Harris School of Public Policy, University of Chicago

Katrina Lewis is an M.P.P candidate at the University of Chicago's Harris School of Public Policy. Her main area of interest is energy economics and policy. Katrina holds a B.A. in Organizational Studies and French from the University of Michigan and a certificate of political studies from the Institut d'études politiques.

Karen Krieb

krieb.jpg

Masters Student, DePaul University

 

 

 

Karen Krieb is a graduate student in the Computer Science MS program at DePaul University. She has worked as an environmental consultant with a focus on industrial water issues and currently works as a data scientist. She received a BA in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology from Princeton University with thesis work on soil nutrients and reforestation in Pedasí, Panama. 

Jiali Wang

Jiali_Wang.jpg

Postdoctoral appointee, Climate & Atmospheric Science Department, Argonne National Laboratory

 

 

 

Jiali received her Ph.D. in Atmospheric Science from the Institute of Atmospheric Physics at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2012.

Her capabilities include: downscaling of climate models to regional and local scales; big data analysis; regional modeling of atmospheric physics and extreme climate/weather events; evaluation of model performance by applying statistical technologies; assessment of urban climate impacts.

Ricardo B. Lourenço

ricardo_lourenco.jpg

Graduate Student, University of Chicago

Ricardo Barros Lourenço is a CS Ph.D. Student at the University of Chicago. He holds an MSc. in Predictive Analytics at DePaul University, also awarded a scholarship of Brazil Scientific Mobility Program (“Ciência sem Fronteiras”) from CAPES Foundation / Brazilian Ministry of Education. He received a BA in Image and Sound from the Federal University of São Carlos. While a student of Geology at State University of Campinas (UNICAMP), has worked with Airborne Geophysics and Seismic Data Processing.

He is a Research Assistant at the Computation Institute (a joint-venture from University of Chicago and Argonne National Laboratory) working with the Center for Robust Decision Making on Climate and Energy Policy (RDCEP) and Globus Labs teams.

He is interested in problems comprehending large-scale geospatial data acquisition, integration, and processing, involving machine learning and computer vision methods implemented in High-Performance Computing facilities.

Research Interests:

  • Machine learning
  • Distributed remote sensing

Current Projects:

ATLAS

Delphine Deryng

Postdoctoral Scholar, Computation Institute, University of Chicago

Adjunct Research Scientist, NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies & Columbia University Center for Climate Systems Research

 

Areas of Expertise:

  • Agricultural systems and climate change
  • Impacts, adaptation and vulnerability
  • The water-energy-food nexus
  • Modeling uncertainty and robust decision making

Delphine Deryng's research deals with global environmental change issues with a particular interest in agricultural systems and implications for food security. She develops and uses process-based crop modeling tools to explore the interaction between climate, crops and land use decision. She conducts multiple research activities as part of the AgMIP Global Gridded Crop Model Intercomparison (GGCMI) initiative exploring the role of extreme weather events on global crop yield and better understanding the effects of rising atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations on crop water productivity. In addition, she currently leads the first Regional Gridded Crop Modeling Activity (RGCMA) to assess the potential impacts of irrigated crop production on ground water resources in India under climate change using an ensemble of gridded models and regional climate and agricultural datasets.

Prior joining RDCEP, Delphine worked on southern Africa’s hydro-economy and water security as a Research Associate at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics (2014-2015).

Delphine holds a PhD in Environmental Sciences from the University of East Anglia (2014) and a Masters in Geography from McGill University (2009). She joined the Computation Institute in November 2015.

Research Projects

AgGRID | InterSectoral Impacts Model Intercomparison and Improvement Project (ISI-MIP) | The Agricultural Model Intercomparison and Improvement Project (AgMIP) | The Global Gridded Crop Model Intercomparison

Selected Publications

  • Deryng D, Elliott J et al. (in review, submitted to Nature Climate Change) “Regional disparities in the beneficial effects of rising CO2 emissions on crop water productivity”
  • Conway D, Archer E, Deryng D et al. (2015) “Climate and Southern Africa’s water-energy-food nexus”, Nature Climate Change 5, 837–846 (2015) doi:10.1038/nclimate2735
  • Deryng D (2014) “Climate change impacts on crop productivity in global semi-arid areas and selected semi-arid economies”, working paper, Overseas Development Institute (ODI), London
  • Deryng D, Conway D, Ramankutty N et al. (2014) “Global crop yield response to extreme heat stress under multiple climate change futures”, Environmental Research Letters, 9, 034011, doi:10.1088/1748-9326/9/3/034011
  • Rosenzweig C, Elliott J, Deryng D et al. (2014) “Assessing agricultural risks of climate change in the 21st century in a global gridded crop model intercomparison”, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 111(9), pp.3268–3273. doi:10.1073/pnas.1222463110
  • Elliott J, Deryng D et al. (2014) “Constraints and potentials of future irrigation water availability on agricultural production under climate change”, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 111(9), pp.3239–3244. doi:10.1073/pnas.1222474110
  • Deryng D, Sacks, WJ, Barford CC, and Ramankutty N (2011) “Simulating the effects of climate and land management practices on global crop yield”, Global Biogeochemical Cycles, 25(2), doi:10.1029/2009GB003765

 


 

Severin Thaler

Graduate Student, Department of Computer Science, University of Chicago

 

 

 

Severin Thaler received a MSc in Mathematics from ETH Zurich with a focus on Numerical Analysis and is currently a PhD candidate at the Department of Computer Science at the University of Chicago. He is contributing to the implementation of a platform allowing storage, analysis, and visualization of large-scale climate data with the goal of raising awareness on climate change and ultimately to convince policy-makers.

Research Interests:

  • Spatio-Temporal Databases
  • Distributed Systems
  • Machine Learning
  • Climate Analysis

Current Projects: EDE

 

Shanshan Sun

Postdoctoral Scholar, Department of the Geophysical Sciences, University of Chicago

Sun’s current research focuses on studying the transient climate behaviors and the physical mechanisms governing them using both state-of-the-art General Circulation Models (GCMs) and one-column models which are computationally efficient. She also maintains and helps build the library of transient climates from GCM outputs.

Sun received her PhD from University of Connecticut in 2012.

Research Interests:

  • Transient climate evolutions and its potential causes
  • Land-atmosphere interaction
  • Ocean-atmosphere interaction and its impacts on land-atmosphere interaction
  • Dynamic vegetation’s role in the climate system

Research Projects:

Soil Moisture | Climate Variability: statistics and observation based simulations | Shadowing | Climate variability: effect of model spatial resolution

Evan Anderson

Associate Professor, Department of Economics, Northern Illinois University

Areas of Expertise:

  • Financial Economics
  • Macroeconomics
  • Computational Economics

Professor Anderson received his PhD from the University of Chicago in 1998. Prior to joining Northern Illinois University, he held a position at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His recent research has focused on risk sharing when agents have risk-sensitive preferences, and on the implications of heterogeneous beliefs for asset pricing.

Research Projects

Robustness in Economic Models with Climate Change

William Brock

Vilas Research Professor, Emeritus of Economics, University of Wisconsin, Madison

Research Professor, University of Missouri, Columbia

Areas of Expertise:

  • Complex dynamics in economics
  • Mathematical economics

Brock is the Vilas Research Professor of Economics, Emeritus at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, where he has taught economics since 1975. Brock received his PhD in Mathematics from the University of California, Berkeley. He is well known for his contributions to the theory of optimal growth, the breadth of applications of the intertemporal model to economics, and other aspects of nonlinear dynamics.

Brock has been a Fellow of the Academy of Arts and Sciences since 1992, a member of the National Academy of Sciences since 1998,  and a Distinguished Fellow of the American Economics Association since 2004.

Research Projects

Robustness in Economic Models with Climate Change |  Heat Balance Climate Models

 

Recent Publications

 

William Brock, Lars Peter Hansen Wrestling with Uncertainty in Climate Economic Models, October 9, 2017, SSRN. (lecture on this paper here)

 

Brock, W. and A. Xepapadeas. 2017. Climate Change Policy Under Polar Amplification.  European Economic Review 94:263-282.

 

Cai, Y., W. Brock, and A. Xepapadeas. 2016. Climate Change Economics and Heat

Transport Across the Globe: Spatial-DSICE. In 2017 Allied Social Science Association

(ASSA) Annual Meeting, January 6-8, 2017, Chicago, Illinois, 251833. Agricultural and

Applied Economics Association

 

Anderson, E. W., W. A. Brock, and A. Sanstad. 2016. Robust Consumption and Energy

Decisions. Working paper, SSRN.

 

Evan Anderson et al. "Robust analytical and computational explorations of coupled economic-climate models with carbon-climate response." RDCEP Working Paper No. 14-05, January 2014.

 

W A Brock et al. “Energy balance climate models, damage reservoirs, and the time profile of climate change policy.” Oxford Handbook of the Macroecon. of Global Warming, Ox U Press 2014. Ch 3 p 1952

 

*Brock, William, Gustav Engstrom, and Anastasios Xepapadeas. "Spatial climate-economic models in the design of optimal climate policies across locations." European Economic Review 69 (2014): 78-103.

 

 

Carpenter, S., Brock, W., Folke, C., Van Ness, E., Scheffer, M., 2015,

 “Allowing variance may enlarge the safe operating space for exploited

ecosystems,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, USA, 112(46):14384-14389

 

William Brock and Steven Durlauf. 2015, On sturdy policy evaluation,.  Journal of Law and Economics, 44,S2.

 

 

*William A. Brock et al. "Energy balance climate models and general equilibrium optimal mitigation policies." Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control 37, no. 12 (2013): 2371-2396.

 

 

William A Brock et al. Optimal control in space and time and the management of environmental resources. Annu. Rev. Resour. Econ., 6(1):33–68, 2014.

 

William A Brock, Anastasios Xepapadeas, and Athanasios N Yannacopoulos. Spatial externalities and agglomeration in a competitive industry. Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, 42:143–174, 2014.

 

William A Brock, Anastasios Xepapadeas, and Athanasios N Yannacopoulos. Optimal agglomerations in dynamic economics. Journal of Mathematical Economics, 53:1–15, 2014

 

William Brock, Anastasios Xepapadeas, et al. Modeling coupled climate, ecosystems, and economic systems.Technical report, Athens University of Economics and Business, 2015. Revised, 2017,

forthcoming in Handbook of Environmental Economics, Partha Dasgupta et al., eds., Elsevier: North Holland.

 

Brock, William A., Anastasios Xepapadeas, and A. N. Yannacopoulos. "Robust control and hot spots in spatiotemporal economic systems." Dynamic Games and Applications, (2014): 1-33.

 

W A Brock et al. “Robust control of a spatially distributed commercial fishery.” Dynamic Optimization in Environmental Economics, E. Moser et al, editors, Springer, 2014. Pgs 215–241.

 

William A. Brock et al. "Spatial externalities and agglomeration in a competitive industry." Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control 42 (2014): 143-174.

 

 

Stephen R Carpenter, William A Brock, Jonathan J Cole, and Michael L Pace. A new approach for rapid detection of nearby thresholds in ecosystem time series. Oikos, 123(3):290–297, 2014.

 

 

James J Elser, Timothy J Elser, Stephen R Carpenter, and William A Brock. Regime shift in fertilizer commodities indicates more turbulence ahead for food security. PloS one, 9(5):e93998, 2014

 

 

S. Kefi et al. Early warning signals of ecological transitions: methods for spatial patterns. PloS one, 2014.

 

Won Chang

Professor, Department of Statistics, University of Cincinnati

Won Chang is currently a professor at the University of Cincinnati. Before this new appointment, Won was a postdoctoral scholar in Department of Statistics at the University of Chicago. His research focuses on statistical methods for simulating important aspects of future climate such as storm patterns and sea level changes. The statistical challenges of this work involve performing conditional simulation and climate model calibration using high-dimensional and non-Gaussian space-time data. 

 

Research Interests:

  • Big data issues in climate research: 
  • Modeling non-Gaussian and high-dimensional space-time data
  • Climate model emulation and calibration
  • Conditional simulation of climate processes

Current Research Project at RDCEP:

Publications: 

Yongyang Cai

Senior Research Scientist, Becker Friedman Institute, University of Chicago

Visiting the Hoover Institution, Stanford University

Areas of Expertise:

  • Dynamic programming and numerical methods
  • Algorithms and applications of mathematical programming in economics, finance and climate change

Cai's research focuses on numerical dynamic programming and its applications in economics, finance and climate change. He has developed several numerical dynamic programming algorithms and a software package for high-dimensional dynamic programming problems with both continuous and discrete states and controls. Examples include optimal growth problems and dynamic portfolio optimization problems. He is currently working on applications of numerical dynamic programming algorithms for solving integrated assessment models of climate and economics with uncertainty.

Cai completed his PhD in 2010 at the Institute for Computational & Mathematical Engineering at Stanford University. 

Research Projects

Dynamic stochastic integrated assessment modelingFABLE |  | DSICE | Model uncertainty and energy technology policy

Hailiang Du

Research Scientist, Computation Institute, University of Chicago

Areas of Expertise:

  • Analysis and prediction of nonlinear systems
  • Data Assimilation
  • Parameter estimation
  • Forecast interpretation and evaluation

Hailiang's research ranges from the advancement of the theory of nonlinear dynamical systems to the application of these insights in the context of large-scale numerical models including weather and climate. He is particularly interested in advancing the understanding of predictability in the context of those models, and better understanding the dynamics, analysis, and interpretation (for decision support) of climate models in general. His previous research work includes parameter estimation via examining the dynamical consistency of the model and via probabilistic skill score; advancing pseudo-orbit data assimilation approach for state estimation; evaluating probabilistic skill in real world ensemble forecasts, and forecast interpretation using sustainable odds. 

Hailiang received his PhD in statistics from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) in 2009. He held post-doctoral positions within the Centre for Climate Change Economics and Policy and the Centre for the Analysis of Time Series at LSE before joining RDCEP at the University of Chicago in 2014.

Research Projects

Model fidelity | Shadowing 

Michael Glotter

Researcher, RDCEP

AAAS Fellow, Office of US Senator Al Franken

Lars Peter Hansen

Co-PI, RDCEP (2010 - 2015)

Research Director, Becker Friedman Institute

David Rockefeller Distinguished Service Professor

Department of Economics, University of Chicago

 

Areas of Expertise:

  • Methodology: Econometrics
  • Economics: Asset Pricing

Hansen is a recipient of the 2013 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel for his early research.  Hansen shares this honor with Eugene Fama and Robert Shiller.

Hansen's work explores formal implications of dynamic economic models in which decision makers face uncertain environments. The main theme of his research has been to devise and apply econometric methods that are consistent with the probabilistic framework of the economic models under investigation. His work has implications for consumption, savings investment, and asset pricing. 

Hansen's early research in econometrics was aimed at developing time series statistical methods to investigate one part of an economic model without having to fully specify and estimate all of the model ingredients. The applications he explored with several coauthors included systems that are rich enough to support models of asset valuation and to identify and clarify empirical puzzles, where real-world financial and economic data were at odds with prevailing academic models.

He continues to explore, analyze, and interpret implications of dynamic economic models in environments with uncertainty from a time-series perspective. His recent research explores ways to quantify intertemporal risk-return tradeoffs and ways to model economic behavior when decision makers are uncertain about how to forecast future economic events.

Hansen is a fellow of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Finance Association. He is also a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and past president of the Econometric Society. Hansen is a former John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellow and Sloan Foundation Fellow.

Hansen won the 2010 BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in the Economics, Finance and Management "for making fundamental contributions to our understanding of how economic actors cope with risky and changing environments." In 2008, Hansen was awarded the CME Group-MSRI Prize in Innovative Quantitative Applications. This award is designed to recognize individuals or groups who contribute original concepts and innovation in the use of mathematical, statistical or computational methods for the study of the behavior of markets, and more broadly of economics. Hansen is one of two scholars to receive the prestigious 2006 Nemmers Prizes in economics and mathematics, believed to be the largest monetary awards in the United States for outstanding achievements in those two disciplines. 

Research Projects

Robustness in Economic Models With Climate Change

Former Students

 Botao Wu   |  Scott Lee