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.