Our Team
Describe your team here.
Xinming Du graduated from Columbia in 2023 (current website)
Xinming is interested in environmental economics and air pollution. Her current research focuses on how environmental factors affect socioeconomic outcomes, how sustainable development policies achieve their goals, and how to develop better measurement of pollution using emerging satellite instruments.
Reed Walker graduated from Columbia in 2012 (current website).
Focus areas: environmental economics, labor economics.
He examines the cost of environmental regulation using microlevel Census data.
Vincent Bagilet is a fourth year PhD student in Sustainable Development. His main research interests revolve around the determinants of environmental attitudes of individuals. He uses observational data to study to what extent social norms, public policies and peer effects can affect the environmental consumption behavior and preferences of individuals.
Vincent holds masters in Quantitative Economics from Paris School of Economics (Public Policy and Development), in Environmental Economics from Université Paris Saclay/AgroParisTech and in Engineering with a specialization in Energy from Ecole Centrale Lyon.
I am a sixth-year PhD Candidate in Sustainable Development at Columbia University, and a Research Fellow at the Columbia Center for Political Economy.
My research stands at the intersection of environmental economics and empirical industrial organization, with a focus on firm dynamics and relations between productivity and sustainability.
Prior to joining Columbia, I earned master degrees in Quantitative Economics from the Paris School of Economics, and in International Relations from Sciences-Po - Paris, as well as bachelor degrees in Political Sciences (Sciences-Po), Law (Paris 1 - Sorbonne), Philosophy (Paris 10 - Nanterre), and studied Pure Mathematics for three years at Paris 6 - UPMC.
I visited Mathias Reynaert at the Toulouse School of Economics in fall 2023.
I also worked for a public policy consulting cabinet in Brussels, Belgium - specifically on European Union policy for the year 2013-2014, and worked one semester for the French Treasury’s office within the French Embassy in Bucharest, Romania.
I am on the 2024-2025 academic job market.
Tim Foreman graduated from Columbia in 2019 (current website).
Tim's research focuses on environmental, health, and development economics, with a focus on estimating the impacts of climate change on economic development. He also works on the implications of climate change for migration and conflict.
PhD candidate in Sustainable Development at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs.
Primary fields and interests: entrepreneurship and innovation, labor, public economics
Currently, I am studying the impact of disasters on firm and labor dynamics and the role of federal assistance in recovery. I am also using experimental tools to study hiring and labor markets.
I have a B.A. in economics with honors from Princeton University. Prior to graduate school, I spent two years in litigation consulting at Analysis Group. Outside of academics, I enjoy reading non-fiction, pour painting, and cooking.
You can download my CV here.
Stephanie Lackner is an environmental economist. Her research interests revolve around natural hazards, the socioeconomic impacts of disasters and geospatial data analysis.
Solomon Mosisa Gofere graduated in 2023 and now works at Analysis Group. Solomon studied Economics at Addis Ababa University and also attended a graduate program in Economic Policy Management at Columbia University. Prior to joining the program, Solomon worked as Research Assistant for the National Bank of Ethiopia and the Ethiopian Economic Association, and also briefly held an academic position at Addis Ababa University.
Solomon is interested broadly in the fields of health, environmental and development economics. He is primarily interested in health literacy, health care demand and health outcomes and in the relationship between health and the environment in general. Solomon is also interested in the interaction between investment in education, education quality and human capital and other economic outcomes.
Solomon Hsiang graduated from Columbia in 2011 (current website).
He combines data with mathematical models to understand how society and the environment influence one another. In particular, he focuses on how policy can encourage economic development while managing the global climate. His research has been published in Nature, Science, and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Hsiang earned a BS in Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Science and a BS in Urban Studies and Planning from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and he received a PhD in Sustainable Development from Columbia University. He was a Post-Doctoral Fellow in Applied Econometrics at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) and a Post-Doctoral Fellow in Science, Technology and Environmental Policy at Princeton University. Hsiang is currently the Chancellor's Professor of Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley and a Research Associate at the NBER.
Semee Yoon graduated from Columbia in 2015.
Her research interests lie primarily at the nexus of development and environment to enhance livelihoods of the poor. She is also interested in innovative solutions to alleviate poverty and pursue environmental sustainability. She has worked on impact evaluation of various solar energy solutions in India. Currently, she is working on the microeconomic analysis of Vietnamese households' livelihoods; transboundary air pollution and health and gender issues in East and South Asia; STEM education as a mechanism to motivate Tanzanian students; and social entrepreneurship and specialty coffee as a channel to facilitate sustainable development.
Focus areas: International cooperation, global public goods, climate change, ocean governance, infectious diseases
Scott Barrett is a leading scholar on transnational and global challenges, ranging from climate change to disease eradication. His research focuses on how institutions like customary law and treaties can be used to promote international cooperation.
He has advised a number of international organizations, including the United Nations, the World Bank, the OECD, the European Commission, and the International Task Force on Global Public Goods. He was previously a lead author of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and a member of the Academic Panel to the Department of Environment in the UK.
Barrett previously taught at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, D.C., where he also directed the International Policy program. Before that, he was on the faculty of the London Business School. He has also held visiting positions at Yale, Princeton, Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, the Institute for Advanced Study in Berlin, and École Polytechnique.
Barrett is a research fellow with the Beijer Institute (Stockholm), CESifo (Munich), and the Kiel Institute of World Economics.
Sandra Baquié is an alumni of the Sustainable Development PhD program. Her main research interests lie in the fields of Development, Health, and Environmental Economics. After an MSc. Engineering from the Ecole Centrale Paris and work experiences in Asia, her passion for Development led her to the University of Cambridge where she obtained a MPhil. Economics summa cum laude.
Sandra's ongoing projects range from the analysis of nutritional vulnerability in the aftermaths of shocks to the study of the quality of data collected in uncertain times. She is also working on an interdisciplinary project with Prof. DeFries relating migration to forest degradation in Central India. Prior to starting her PhD, Sandra gained extensive experience in developing countries from working as a mechanic in China to being a production manager in Cambodia to interning at United Nations ESCAP.
Sandra Aguilar Gomez is an alumni of the Sustainable Development PhD program. She is currently a postdoc at the Center for Global Transformation at UC San Diego and will join join Universidad de los Andes as an Assistant Professor of Economics in Fall 2022.
While at Columbia University, Sandra was awarded the Wu Fellowship for her research in health, wellbeing and public policy, as well as the Center for Development Economics and Policy Research Grant and the 2019 Lead Teaching Fellowship. Her main research interests lie in the fields of health, climate change, and development economics.
Her ongoing research focuses on gender disparities in the context of natural resource shocks (particularly, the California Gold Rush), as well as environmental impacts on women’s health in developing countries (Mexico and Tanzania). She also studies social norms formation, transmission and their impact on economic outcomes.
She has worked with the Data Science group of Mt. Sinai Icahn School of Medicine, and the Economic Research Division at Mexico’s Central Bank, where she conducted research on health policy, crime prevention and financial inclusion. She holds a Master in Applied Economics from Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México (ITAM), as well as a degree in Economics from the same university.
Focus areas: environmental and natural resource economics, climate change, carbon markets, carbon pricing, international climate policy, conservation policy, econometric analysis of land-use change, economics of tropical deforestation, reducing emissions from deforestation, and forest degradation (REDD+).
Ruben Lubowski teaches environmental and natural resource economics, with a focus on carbon pricing policies. He specializes on carbon market design, the economics of land-use change, and incentive-based policies and financing approaches to reduce deforestation and other land-based emissions. He is the Chief Natural Resource Economist at the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), a nonprofit environmental advocacy group working to find pragmatic science-based solutions to environmental problems. He overseas research efforts on climate policy and works with researchers and policy practitioners around the world to apply economic analysis to help design and implement strategies to conserve forests, promote sustainable agriculture, and reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
Lubowski was a lead author of the World Bank and International Carbon Action Partnership (ICAP) handbook on emissions trading system design, which policymakers in various countries are using to develop carbon market programs. He has provided expert testimony at Congressional and regulatory hearings and briefings in the US and overseas, and is invited often to serve on technical advisory groups and speak to diverse audiences worldwide. In addition to his teaching at Columbia, he has also taught as an Adjunct Professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business.
He has served as an economist and land-use expert at the United States Department of Agriculture. He also developed and managed environmental projects in Latin America at the United Nations Development Program. He conducted research at the World Bank and the Harvard Institute for International Development, including a two-year study in Sri Lanka to quantify the contribution of tropical forest products to the livelihoods of rainforest communities.
Lubowski received his Ph.D. and master’s degree in Political Economy and Government as well as his bachelor’s degree from Harvard University.
Professor of International and Public Affairs
SIPA Professorship of Energy Policy
Columbia University
Co-Editor: Journal of Public Economics
Associate Editor: Journal of Political Economy: Microeconomics
Research Associate: National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER)
Affiliate: Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL)
Chief Economist: Centre for Net Zero, Octopus Energy Group
Curriculum Vitae | Google Scholar | RePEc | Twitter | LinkedIn
I am a PhD candidate in Sustainable Development at Columbia University.
My PhD program includes core training in economics with additional social and natural science training.
From 2021-2022 I served in the Biden-Harris Administration as the Climate Staff Economist at the Council of Economic Advisers.
I do research on environmental and public economics—especially topics in climate and health—and on achieving global cooperation to address global risks. My research has been covered in outlets such as the NYTimes, NPR, Scientific American, and Vox.
Get in touch: rdb2148 (at) columbia.edu
I am on the 2024-2025 job market.
Focus areas: Economic Theory, Economics of Climate Change, Game Theory, Microeconomics
Prajit K. Dutta is a Professor in the Department of Economics at Columbia University, author of Strategies and Games: Theory and Practice, MIT Press, and a Partner at Aicon Art in downtown Manhattan. Previously, he was an Associate Professor at the Department of Economics at the University of Wisconsin, Editorial Board Member at Economic Theory and a Partner at Aicon Art Funds.
He is a microeconomist and game theorist with a special interest in the Economics of Climate Change. His past research focused on Dynamic Programming and Mathematical Economics, Capital Allocation and Growth Theory, Market Survival and Moral Hazard. He became interested in Stochastic Games twenty years back and continues to work in that area with an added emphasis on Asynchronous Games and Climate Change Modeling.
Patrick Bolton is the David Zalaznick Professor of Business. He joined Columbia Business School in July 2005. He received his PhD from the London School of Economics in 1986 and holds a BA in economics from the University of Cambridge and a BA in political science from the Institut d'Etudes Politiques de Paris.
He began his career as an assistant professor at the University of California at Berkeley and then moved to Harvard University, joining their economics department from 1987-1989. He was Chargé de Recherche at the C.N.R.S. Laboratoire d’ Econométrie de L’ Ecole Polytechnique from 1989-1991, Cassel Professor of Money and Banking at the London School of Economics from 1991-1994, Chargé de cours associé at the Institut d'Etudes Europénnes de l'Université Libre de Bruxelles from 1994-1998, and John H. Scully ’66 Professor of Finance and Economics at Princeton University from 1998-2005.
His research and areas of interest are in contract theory and contracting issues in corporate finance and industrial organization. A central focus of his work is on the allocation of control and decision rights to contracting parties when long-term contracts are incomplete. This issue is relevant in many different contracting areas including: the firm’s choice of optimal debt structure, corporate governance and the firm’s optimal ownership structure, vertical integration, and constitution design. His work in industrial organization focuses on antitrust economics and the potential anticompetitive effects of various contracting practices. He recently published his first book, Contract Theory, with Mathias Dewatripont and has co-edited a second book with Howard Rosenthal, Credit Markets for the Poor.Expertise: Climate Finance, Household Finance, Real Estate, Corporate Finance
Welcome! I am an Assistant Professor of Finance at Columbia Business School. I received my B.A. in economics and mathematics from Columbia University, and my Ph.D. in finance from MIT. I study climate finance and real estate, focusing specifically on how financial intermediaries (banks, insurers) affect climate adaptation and mitigation.
Pablo Egaña del Sol graduated from Columbia in 2016 (current website).
Focus area: Entrepreneurship and Sustainable Development
He has been studying the production function of entrepreneurial, creative and socio-emotional skills in educational and labor markets. For this research he uses randomized control trials as well as lab-in-the-field experiments combining behavioral economics and cognitive neuroscience.
Nicole Ngo graduated from Columbia in 2013 (current website).
Focus areas: health economics, environmental economics
I am a sixth-year PhD Candidate in Sustainable Development at Columbia University and a Research Fellow at the Columbia Center for Political Economy.
I am interested in topics in political economy, environmental economics, and empirical industrial organization.
Before joining Columbia, I earned a Masters degree in Quantitative Economics from the Paris School of Economics and a Bachelor’s degree in Economics from Paris Sciences et Lettres.
I visited UC Berkeley in the Spring 2023, sponsored by Francesco Trebbi.
I also worked for the French Development Agency (AFD) at their Central Asia regional office in Tashkent, Uzbekistan where I was working on energy and water projects.
I am on the 2024-2025 academic job market.
Mehdi Benatiya Andaloussi graduated from Columbia in 2019 (current website).
Focus areas: energy economics; environmental economics; urban economics; applied micro.
Matthew Neidell is an economics professor in the Department of Health Policy and Management at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health. He is also a faculty member with the Earth Institute and the Columbia Population Research Center. He is also a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research and a Research Fellow at the Institute of Labor Economics (IZA).
Neidell received his PhD in economics from UCLA, and was a post-doc at the University of Chicago prior to joining Columbia. He has held visiting positions at the European University Institute and the Property and Environment Research Center. He previously served on the Environmental Economics Advisory Board of the Environmental Protection Agency’s Scientific Advisory Board and on the Institute of Medicine’s “Study on an Oral Health Initiative.”
His fields of specialization are environmental, health, and labor economics, with research primarily focused at the intersections of these. His most recent work applies the latest empirical methods to examine the relationship between the environment and a wide range of measures of well-being, including worker productivity, human capital, and decision making. Previous related work has focused on the effect of the environment on health outcomes and avoidance behavior, Neidell has published extensively in both economics and health science journals. He is currently a co-editor at the Journal of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economistsand associate editor at the Journal of Human Resources.
I am a PhD candidate in the Sustainable Development program at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs.
I work on questions in environmental economics and climate change adaptation using tools from empirical industrial organization.
I hold a Master's degree in Environmental Economics and Climate Change from the London School of Economics and a Bachelor's degree from Ecole Polytechnique, France. Prior to my PhD, I worked as a consultant in disaster risk management at the World Bank.
I am on the 2024-2025 job market.
Kyle Meng graduated from Columbia in 2013 (current website).
Focus areas: environmental and resource economics, fisheries.
Focus areas: Quantitative analyses for practical application in regulatory oversight, law enforcement, performance and damage valuation, strategic development, and policy assessment.
Kitty Kay Chan is a Professor of Professional Practice at Columbia University’s School of Professional Studies and also serves as Academic Director for the Master of Science in Applied Analytics program. Dr. Chan specializes in quantitative analyses for practical application in regulatory oversight, law enforcement, performance and damage valuation, strategic development, and policy assessment. Her career has spanned state and federal government as well as the private sector and academia. She has experience with a wide range of industries, including agriculture, computers, electric utilities, entertainment, financial services, health care, internet, telecommunications, transportation, public integrity and safety, and real estate.
Prior to joining SPS, Dr. Chan led data analytics efforts for New York State. As the Chief Data Analytics Officer, she served as the State’s expert in data analytics and worked with stakeholders to develop strategies and build analytics products to derive actionable information from data across State agencies and functions. Before that, Dr. Chan served as the Chief Economist at the New York State Department of Financial Services, which supervises and regulates thousands of banks, insurance companies, public pensions, and other financial institutions. She oversaw quantitative analysis and provided expert advice and evaluation including risk assessment, pricing, regulation design, emerging economic and industry trends, data management, and investigations.
Dr. Chan also served as the Chief Economist and Director of Audit and Examination for the New York State Joint Commission on Public Ethics, and as a Deputy Inspector General for the New York State Inspector General’s Office. She built and led a new quantitative analysis division at each of these entities to monitor and investigate waste, fraud and abuse, and implement strategies to improve efficiency and transparency through audits and examinations. Previously, as the Director of Economics for the New York State Office of the Attorney General and in her positions at the US Federal Communication Commission, the US Department of Agriculture, and a private economic consulting firm, Dr. Chan applied quantitative techniques to a range of legal, regulatory, and policy issues, including mergers, bid rigging, market timing, utility rate filings, economic development, and international trade and investment.
Dr. Chan has published in academic journals, books, and technical reports, and has served as an expert in litigations, investigations, regulatory filings, professional trainings and global initiatives. She has taught and been a Research Fellow at New York University. She was a National Science Foundation Fellow and holds a B.A., M.A., as well as a Ph.D. in Economics, and a Doctoral Certificate in Environmental Sciences, Policy, and Engineering from the University of Southern California.
Kimberly Oremus graduated from Columbia in 2017 (current website).
Focus areas: natural resource economics and policy, climate change and adaptation, international agreements, fisheries
Kayleigh Campbell graduated from Columbia in 2017 (current website).
Focus areas: transportation and urban planning
Kayleigh's research explores how transportation shapes cities and the lives of people in cities. She is currently a Senior Transportation Economist at the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority. She previously worked at the World Bank in the Development Impact Evaluation (DIME) group managing operations for a transportation research program of over 30 impact evaluations in 19 different countries. Kayleigh works with teams to embed research and data analysis into operational projects. This way of doing research has been an effective tool for implementing change and creating demand for evidence-based decision making within an organization.
Kate (Ruinan) Liu graduated from Columbia in 2018 (current website).
Justin Ho is a PhD student in sustainable development at Columbia University with a background in chemical engineering, organic chemistry, and material science. He worked for a decade in academia and in industry with fuel cells and lithium batteries before venturing into the world of social science. He also has a handful of patents in medicinal chemistry from over a decade ago when he lived in Copenhagen and worked for a small pharmaceutical start-up. These days, he tries to keep faith with the scientist in himself and looks for projects at the interface of energy, environment, and economics. He has studied electricity peak-shifting and environmental externalities induced by residential smart meters and career concerns in the natural gas markets. He is also an avid gardener and is trying to sustain a monarch butterfly population in his parents' backyard in Maryland.
Joséphine Gantois is an alumni of the Sustainable Development PhD program. She works across environmental economics and ecology. She uses a causal lens to study human-ecosystem interactions, with a specific interest in land use impacts on ecosystem health and resilience, and in the economic costs of loss of resilience and biodiversity. She is also exploring methodological questions at the intersection of remote sensing, machine learning and causal inference. In particular, she is working on monitoring flower phenology from space, on modeling plant-pollinator interactions under a changing climate, and on reconstructing past temperature extremes using tree ring data.
She graduated from the Ecole Polytechnique with a multidisciplinary bachelor in Science and Engineering, and a masters in Economics and Public Policy. She then refined her economic intuition and development policy skills through an MPA in International Development at the London School of Economics. Before joining the PhD program, she worked with the Social Protection Unit and Human Development Network of the World Bank, and with development and trade economists at the Columbia Business School.
José Carlos Orihuela graduated from Columbia in 2010 (current website)
Areas of interest: political economy of development and the environment.
José Carlos studies how institutions evolve, the forging of environmental governance, and the political economy of nature and natural resources. His research has appeared at New Political Economy, Journal of Institutional Economics, Forest Policy and Economics, Studies in Comparative International Development and World Development, among other journals and edited volumes. He co-edited Resource Booms and Institutional Pathways: The Case of the Extractive Industry in Peru (Palgrave 2017) and co-authored The Developmental Challenges of Mining and Oil: Lessons from Africa and Latin America (Palgrave 2012).
Currently, he is carrying out research on the local resource curse, comparative developmental state formation in the Andean countries, and the institutions governing protected areas in the southern Peruvian Amazon.
An associate professor at the Department of Economics of PUCP, he was a lecturer at New School, a visiting professor at Brown and a fellow at The Watson Institute and SSRC-DSD.
Focus areas: climate finance
José A. Scheinkman is the Charles and Lynn Zhang Professor of Economics at Columbia University, Theodore A. Wells ‘29 Professor of Economics (emeritus) at Princeton University and a Research Associate at the NBER. Previously, Scheinkman was the Alvin H. Baum Distinguished Service Professor and Chairman of the Department of Economics at the University of Chicago, Blaise Pascal Research Professor (France), Visiting Professor at Collège de France, Vice President in the Financial Strategies Group of Goldman, Sachs & Co. and co-editor of the Journal of Political Economy. He has served as a consultant to several financial institutions and serves on the board of Cosan Limited, a NYSE listed company engaged in the production and distribution of sugar, ethanol and energy in Brazil.
Scheinkman is a Member of the National Academy of Sciences, Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Fellow of the American Finance Association, Fellow of the Econometric Society, Corresponding Member of the Brazilian Academy of Sciences, and received a “docteur honoris causa” from the Université Paris-Dauphine. He was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship in 2007 and the CME-MSRI Prize in Innovative Quantitative Applications in 2014. Scheinkman’s current research focuses on speculation in financial markets and on the effect of increases in liquidity on financial fragility.
Focus areas: The role of natural disasters in reducing or enhancing development opportunities for poor and emerging societies
John Mutter's research focuses on the role of natural disasters in constraining development opportunities for poor and emerging societies. Meteorological extremes are expected to increase as a result of human-induced climate change, and his work attempts to assess who are most vulnerable to disasters such as the 2010 Haiti earthquake and Hurricane Katrina.
At SIPA, Mutter created and teaches the core course Environmental Science for Sustainable Development which provides the basis of understanding Earth systems behavior needed for students in the PhD program in sustainable development as well as masters candidates in several programs. He also created and teaches Climate Change, Development and Human Rights.
In undergraduate programs, Mutter co-teaches Disasters and Development and Science for Sustainable Development which is a core course in the undergraduate major in sustainable development in Columbia College. He also teaches graduate level marine seismology in Earth and Environmental Sciences.
He leads the Earth Institute's partnership with the UNEP's Post-Conflict and Disaster Management Branch, researching environmental degradation as both an outcome and driver of disasters and conflicts.
Mutter's work in the natural sciences focuses on the use of marine seismology technologies to study processes in the formation of the earth's crust and mantle at mid-ocean ridge and continental rift settings. In 2008, he served as chief scientist aboard Columbia University research vessel Marcus G. Langseth, conducting the first 3-D seismic imaging experiment of seafloor spreading at the East Pacific Rise. This study will reveal how magma rises from deep in the Earth's interior to create new crust and controls the distribution of biological communities at hydrothermal vent systems.
Mutter is also a principal investigator on the National Science Foundation-funded ADVANCE program, designed to create institutional change that will improve the opportunities for women in earth science and engineering at Columbia.
Mutter is co-founder of the Bamboo Bike project, which creates a new type of bicycle for Africans.
Many of his commentaries on natural disasters and other current issues can be found at OECDinsights and in Earth magazine.
Jesse is a a Collegiate Assistant Professor at the University of Chicago and teaches Global Society in the College Core. Trained as a quantitative social scientist, Jesse does interdisciplinary research on demography and population health. Before joining the University of Chicago, Jesse was a postdoctoral scholar at the Center for Economic History at Northwestern University. Jesse has a PhD in Sustainable Development from Columbia University.
Focus areas: environmental economics, labor economics
Jeffrey Shrader is an Assistant Professor at SIPA. His research areas include environmental and labor economics. His work focuses on the role of expectations and forecasts in helping individuals prepare for changing environmental and economic conditions. This work helps policymakers understand the benefits and limitations of information-based policy interventions and sheds light on the total economic costs of environmental changes. Shrader also studies how individuals choose to use their time and the implications that time use decisions have for economic productivity.
Prior to joining SIPA, he was the 2017–2018 Economic Fellow at the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University School of Law. At the Institute, he worked to improve federal and state decision-making related to climate, environmental, and energy policies. He holds a Ph.D. in economics from the University of California, San Diego and a B.A. in economics and mathematics from Columbia University.
Jason Wong graduated from Columbia in 2019.
Focus Area: Aviation, Infrastructure, and Energy Policy
Jason Wong is an applied microeconomist interested in the impact of technology and infrastructure in regional socioeconomic outcomes and environmental decision making. His research focuses on the impact of aviation connectivity on regional economies and innovation, climate change impacts on aviation, and improving international agreements on sectoral emissions reductions. He also conducts field research on electricity infrastructure and energy poverty in India.
In 2018, Dr Wong served as one of eight International Parliamentary Fellows from the United States at the German Parliament (Bundestag), where he worked on economic, energy, and transport policy. He joined the London School of Economics in June 2019.
James Rising graduated from Columbia in 2015 (current website).
James is an interdisciplinary modeler, studying the feedback between environmental and human systems, and focusing on the impacts of climate change and the water-energy-food nexus. He draws upon analytical and empirical approaches from multiple fields and develops computational and statistical models to understand integrated global challenges. He has also had a career as a software developer, working with over a dozen companies on audio and video processing, social networks, and artificial intelligence.
Hyae Ryung (Helen) Kim is a PhD Student in Sustainable Development. Her fields of interest are environmental and financial economics with a focus on climate and sustainability. Helen uses a range of interdisciplinary approaches in her research to study complex climate problems and develop effective and equitable solutions. Current research studies include examining the role of climate finance and sustainable investment in discerning how to effectively estimate climate change challenges and promote the transition to a net-zero economy.
Prior to joining the Columbia PhD program Helen worked at PwC and the African Development Bank. She was a PhD candidate and a Research Fellow in Innovation Economics at Berlin University of Technology. She holds a BS in Chemical and Biological Engineering and MS in Technology Management, Economics, and Policy from Seoul National University.
Focus Areas: Finance
Harrison Hong's research interests include climate finance.
Focus areas: climate risks and climate policy
Gernot Wagner is a climate economist at Columbia Business School. His research, writing, and teaching focus on climate risks and climate policy. Gernot writes a monthly column for Project Syndicate and has written four books: Geoengineering: the Gamble, published by Polity (2021); Stadt, Land, Klima (“City, Country, Climate”), published, in German, by Brandstätter Verlag (2021); Climate Shock, joint with Harvard’s Martin Weitzman and published by Princeton (2015), among others, a Top 15 Financial Times McKinsey Business Book of the Year 2015, and Austria’s Natural Science Book of the Year 2017; and But will the planet notice?, published by Hill & Wang/Farrar Strauss & Giroux (2011).
Prior to joining Columbia as senior lecturer, Gernot taught at NYU, Harvard, and Columbia. He was the founding executive director of Harvard’s Solar Geoengineering Research Program (2016 – 2019), and served as economist at the Environmental Defense Fund (2008 – 2016), most recently as lead senior economist (2014 – 2016) and member of its Leadership Council (2015 – 2016). He has been a term member of the Council on Foreign Relations, is a Senior Fellow at the Jain Family Institute and is on the board of CarbonPlan.org. He holds a joint bachelor’s magna cum laude with highest honors in environmental science, public policy, and economics, and a master’s and Ph.D. in political economy and government from Harvard, as well as a master’s in economics from Stanford.
I am a Professor of Economics at Columbia Business School. My main academic interests are in economic theory and environmental economics. I am also actively involved with environmental organizations, being on the board of directors of the Union of Concerned Scientists, Chair of the Board of the Coalition for Rainforest Nations and on the Advisory Board of the Environmental Defense Fund. Photography, particularly nature photography, and birdwatching have been lifelong hobbies.
Focus areas: Industrial Organization, Healthcare Economics, and Energy / Environmental Economics.
Gautam Gowrisankaran is a Professor of Economics at Columbia University, Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, Research Fellow of the Centre for Economic and Policy Research, and Professeur afilié at HEC Montréal.
I am an economist with expertise in energy and environmental economics, industrial organization and applied econometrics. I am a PhD candidate in Sustainable Development at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs.
I am currently in the Job Market.
Please be in touch!
https://www.gabrielgonzalezsutil.com
linkedin.com/in/gabrielgonzalezsutil
Francis Annan graduated from Columbia in 2018 (current website).
Francis Annan's research centers on development economics and microeconomic issues, with a focus on digital financial markets, insurance, and firms in sub-Saharan Africa, India, and the United States. Francis received his PhD in Sustainable Development (Economics Track) from Columbia University in 2018.
Professor Annan is a J-PAL Affiliated Professor at MIT, the Scientific Lead and Co-Chair of the Retail Finance Distribution (ReFinD) Research Initiative at ISSER, and a Fellow at the Center for Development Economics and Policy (CDEP) and the Center for Environmental Economics and Policy (CEEP). Prior to UC Berkeley, Francis was an Assistant Professor of Economics, Risk, and Insurance at the J. Mack Robinson College of Business at Georgia State University.
Florian Grosset is a fifth-year PhD student in Sustainable Development at Columbia University. Florian’s research spans the fields of development and environmental economics. He is notably studying, as co-investigator with Eliana Carranza (World Bank), Aletheia Donald (World Bank) and Supreet Kaur (UC Berkeley), the effects of social sharing norms on labor supply in Ivory Coast. His additional research explores the spatial effects of weather shocks, through trade and migration. Ultimately, Florian aims to advance our understanding of the effects of climate change on societies in developing countries – with a particular focus on their spatial diffusion and on the role of social norms.
Prior to starting his PhD, Florian earned a master in economics form the Paris School of Economics and spent a semester as graduate visiting student in UC Berkeley’s PhD program in Economics. He holds bachelors from Sciences Po Paris (Public policy) and the University of Lorraine (Economics). Florian is fluent in English, French and German. He loves data, theory, and bringing both together.
Eyal Frank graduated from Columbia in 2017 (current website).
Focus area: intersection of economics and conservation.
His work addresses three broad questions: (i) how do natural inputs, namely animals, contribute to different production functions of interest, (ii) how do market dynamics reduce natural habitats and lead to declining wildlife population levels, and (iii) what are the costs, indirect ones in particular, of conservation policies.
These areas of research present a causal inference challenge as manipulating ecosystems and species at large scales is often infeasible. He draws on natural experiments from ecology and policy, and use econometric techniques to advance our understanding regarding the social cost of biodiversity losses.
Eugenie Dugoua graduated from Columbia in 2018 (current website)
She is an environmental economist analyzing the issue of technological change. Her interests lie primarily in understanding how institutions and policies influence science, innovation, and technological change so that economic development can be sustainable for the environment and societies.
Dylan Hogan is a third year PhD student in Sustainable Development. He is interested in issues related to climate change and economic development, with particular interest in the role of adaptation mechanisms in reducing impacts to humans and ecosystems. His recent research focuses on the impacts of climate change on agricultural production and water consumption, as well as the linkages between these topics. He uses remotely sensed data and climate models to explore these issues in understudied regions of the world.
Focus areas: Environmental economics, infant health, public policy, China
Douglas Almond is Professor of International & Public Affairs (SIPA) and Economics at Columbia University in New York, and co-directs the Climate, Energy, and Environment Concentration at SIPA. Links to his current research projects are available here.
Almond served as a staff economist at the Council of Economic Advisers during the Clinton administration and studied health effects of pollution in China as a Fulbright scholar. He is a visiting professor at Uppsala University in Sweden (founded in 1477) and serves as a consultant for the Asian Development Bank.
Almond received his BA in Economics from Carleton College in Minnesota and his PhD in Economics from the University of California, Berkeley. He was a postdoctoral fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), where he is currently a research associate in the Children's and Environment and Energy Economics Programs.
Almond received the outstanding adviser award in Columbia's Sustainable Development PhD Program in 2020. Since 2017, Almond et al. have generated over 65 megawatt hours of solar electricity and are a net supplier to Central Hudson Energy, Inc.
Focus areas: Weather-indexed crop insurance, agricultural economics.
Daniel Osgood leads the Financial Instruments Sector Team at IRI, linking climate information to financial tools to improve livelihoods in developing countries. His team supports most of the index insurance projects that have gone to scale, with hundreds of thousands of smallholder farmers purchasing index insurance contracts they have helped design through farmer-driven, science-based processes, leading to significant development impacts. His research topics include uncertainty in decisionmaking, environmental valuation, remote sensing proxies, information, and work specific to index insurance and economic development. He has been involved in global policy processes such as the UNFCCC, with projects he works on highlighted by Ban Ki-moon in the opening speech at the 2015 Paris COP. He has had press coverage in venues spanning Voice of America, Al Jazeera, the Guardian, Nature, New York Times, and Reuters.
Daiju Narita graduated from Columbia in 2008 (current website).
Focus areas: Economics of climate change, the environment and development
Daiju's main research interest lies in the economics of climate change, in particular, theoretical and applied evaluations of economic costs on various aspects of climate change (including ocean acidification, damages of cyclones/typhoons, carbon dioxide capture and storage, and tipping-point risks). The research involves application and examination of methodological frameworks of environmental economics, such as risk analysis and economic valuation of non-market ecosystem services, while it also deals with cross-disciplinary collaboration with natural scientists. His other research interests include sustainable development (the environment and development) and energy issues. Regarding the former, he has engaged in research projects on environmental problems in Thailand, Kenya, Ethiopia and Zambia under JICA (Japan International Cooperation Agency) and others.
Claire Palandri is a sixth-year student in the Sustainable Development PhD program. She holds a master’s degree in Environmental Economics from Université Paris Saclay/AgroParisTech (Paris, France), and studied Environmental Science and Agronomy prior to coming to Columbia.
Claire’s research lies in the field of environmental economics, and she focuses on the animal farming industry for her doctoral work. In particular, she investigates the feedbacks at work within coupled human-ecological systems when animal production becomes more or less industrialized, in the US and abroad (Israel, India).
Her current projects include combining remote sensing data and machine learning methods to analyze the health consequences of living in proximity to confined animal feeding operations (CAFOs), and the relationship between the degree of industrialization of animal production systems and their resilience to shocks (temperature variations, pathogens…).
Christopher D. A. Boone graduated from Columbia in 2015 (current website).
Focus areas: labor economics, economic history, and agricultural economics.
He is an assistant professor in the economics department at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
Carolyn Hayek is a student in the PhD program in Sustainable Development. She holds a B.S. in Chemistry from Boston College with a minor in environmental studies, as well as a Masters in Environmental Engineering and a Masters in Urban Planning from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Carolyn is interested in the interface of the natural and built environments. She is currently working with Dr. Upmanu Lall on the sustainability of United States (US) water resources.
Prior to joining the Columbia community, Carolyn spent 10 years at the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) at the New England regional office in Boston, MA. While there, she was selected for a highly competitive 2-year developmental program designed to expose employees to the full breadth and scope of the Agency. Areas in which Carolyn has worked include: effective management of drinking water and wastewater utilities, grants management and federal oversight of Drinking Water State Revolving Fund programs, water quality sampling, compliance assistance and enforcement for chemical storage and usage, hazardous waste site clean up, green chemistry, wetlands permitting, low impact development, climate change, and the Significant New Alternatives Policy Program for ozone-depleting substances.
Focus areas: Environmental, Social and Corporate Governance (ESG)
Caroline Flammer is a Professor of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University. She is an expert in sustainable investing and the recipient of numerous prestigious awards. Her research examines how, and under which conditions, firms can enhance their competitiveness and long-term profitability while strengthening-instead of undermining-the very system in which they operate and hereby play a critical role in addressing climate change, inequality, global health, and other grand challenges related to society and the natural environment. The Web of Science ranked her among the top-100 Highly Cited Researchers in the economics and business profession in terms of impact over the past 10 years. Among other roles, she serves as the Chair of the Academic Advisory Committee of the United Nations' Principles for Responsible Investment (PRI), the largest network of responsible investors to date. Moreover, she serves as Associate Editor for both Management Science and the Strategic Management Journal.
Focus areas: Contracts and Organization, Econometrics, Industrial Organization, Labor Economics, Microeconomics, Public Economics
Anthony D'Agostino graduated from Columbia in 2017 (current website).
Focus area: Sustainable agriculture, air quality, climate impacts.
Anthony his an applied microeconomist with 15 years of experience working at the intersection of development, environment, and space. He is the project director of a USAID cost-benefit analysis evaluating the economic returns to sustainable land use practices in Ghana, a consultant on a USDA-funded grant to estimate the health and economic impacts of animal agriculture on neighboring communities, and earlier directed two CIFF-funded evaluations on city-level GHG accounting and the development/execution of carbon neutral climate action plans among C40’s member cities. He is passionate about combining geospatial and survey data to better understand our government and foundation clients’ impacts in the land, agriculture, climate, and urban sectors.
Prior to joining Mathematica in 2018, he did his post-doc at Stanford's Center on Food Security and the Environment (Department of Earth System Science). He hold a PhD in Sustainable Development (Columbia University) and an MPP (National University of Singapore). I’ve earlier worked at UNEP, World Resources Institute, International Research Institute for Climate and Society (Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory), Centre on Asia and Globalisation, and the Institute of Water Policy.Anouch Missirian graduated from Columbia in 2020 (current website).
Anouch is primarily interested in how ecosystems and human societies (via their economic component) influence each other. Her current focus is on changes in ecosystem processes that result from changes in the use of agricultural land (e.g. intensification or expansion of pasture, cropland, developed areas, or forest), and the feedback effects of those changes on the economy. Other interests include: pesticides, (environmental) distorsions, human migrations.
Anouch studied Biology and Ecology at the Ecole normale supérieure in Paris, France, and Environmental Economics at AgroParisTech.
Anna Tompsett graduated from Columbia in 2014 (current website).
Her research primarily focuses on public goods: both on estimating the impacts of public goods on human development, and in understanding the political processes that influence the provision of public goods. She use both natural and field experiments to measure the impacts of public goods, and to understand how best to provide them.
Welcome! I am a PhD student in the Sustainable Development program at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs.
I am an environmental economist working on applied microeconomic and interdisciplinary research. I am particularly interested in climate adaptation and plastic pollution. I use remote sensing and non-traditional data in a lot of my projects.
I graduated from Harvard University, where I studied Environmental Engineering and Computer Science. Before starting my PhD, I worked as a research assistant at Yale School of Management and as an equity research associate at AB Bernstein.
I am on the job market this fall (AY 2024-2025).
Curriculum Vitae (Updated March 2024)
Anja Benshaul-Tolonen is an Assistant Professor of Economics at Barnard College, Columbia University since 2015. She works on economic development, environmental economics and economics of gender. One strand of her research focuses on the local welfare effects of natural resource extraction in Africa, including effects on women’s employment and empowerment, health and criminality. Another strand focuses on health and gender, including WASH (water, sanitation and hygiene) and its implications for school absenteeism, stigma around menstrual hygiene, and household health knowledge and investment. Her research methods include quasi-experimental analysis and randomized control trials, and she often uses large datasets. She has peer-reviewed publications in e.g. The Economic Journal, World Development and Land Use Policy. At Barnard, she teaches Empirical Development Economics, Women in Development Economics and Econometrics. She is an affiliated faculty at the Center for Development Economics and Policy at Columbia University and Columbia Population Research Center. She received her Ph.D. in Economics from University of Gothenburg in 2015 and has been a visiting researcher at the University of Oxford, University of California at Berkeley, Princeton University and NYU, and has worked as a consultant at the World Bank and Natural Resource Governance Institute.
Andrew Wilson is a fifth-year PhD candidate in Sustainable Development. He combines math, data, critique, and Halal cart to understand how cities and the environment develop together.
Andrew is originally from California. Before moving to New York, he earned a BA in Political Economy and MPP at UC Berkeley. He previously worked at Habitat for Humanity, USAID, and NextGen Policy Center on housing, global development, and energy policy.
Andrew Donini is the Manager of the Climate, Energy and Environment Concentration at the School of International and Public Affairs and the Manager of the Center for Environmental Economics and Policy. He received his Master of Science in International Affairs from Florida State University and his Bachelor of Arts in Political Science and History from Ohio State University.
Ana Varela Varela is an alumni of the Sustainable Development PhD program. Her research broadly investigates interactions of environmental and urban systems using frameworks and tools from applied microeconomics, data science, and remote sensing.
She holds a Master in City Planning from the University of California, Berkeley, as well as degrees in Environmental Studies from Imperial College London, and in Civil Engineering from the University of A Coruña, Spain. Prior to her PhD, she worked as a consultant in sustainable infrastructure and urban planning projects.
Amir Jina graduated from Columbia in 2014 (current website).
Focus areas: Development economics; Environmental economics; Climate impacts; Climate change adaptation and mitigation
Alice Tianbo Zhang graduated from Columbia in 2019 (current website).
Focus areas: environmental and energy economics, development economics, China, public policy, data science
Alice is an economist passionate about environmental and social justice issues. Her research seeks to improve our understanding of how large-scale natural and social processes, such as anthropogenic climate change, natural disasters, and forced migration, affect economic development and human welfare. She is especially interested in using cutting-edge data and economic models to address the distributional implications of government policies and provide practical solutions for the challenges of sustainability.
