Brent Sohngen

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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

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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

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Robert Jacob

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

rdcep publications
Joshua Elliott et al. "Unilateral carbon taxes, border adjustments, and carbon leakage." Theoretical Inquiries in Law 14 (2013): 207-243.
Joshua Elliott et al. "Impact on US Gasoline Prices of Eliminating Biofuels Production: An Equilibrium Analysis" (2012). RDCEP Working Paper No. 12-05, Argonne National Laboratory, 2011.
Elliott, Joshua, Ian Foster, Samuel Kortum, Gita Khun Jush, Todd Munson, and David Weisbach. "Unilateral Carbon Taxes Border Adjustments and Carbon Leakage" (2012). RDCEP Working Paper No. 12-04.
Elliott, Joshua, Margaret Loudermilk, Nirupama Rao, Ian Foster, Don Fullerton, & Todd Munson. "Building a Custom Initialization Data Product for a Life-cycle OLG Model." GTAP Working Paper. June 2011.
Elliott, Joshua, Ian Foster, Samuel Kortum, Todd Munson, Fernando Perez Cervantes, and David Weisbach. "Trade and carbon taxes." The American Economic Review (2010): 465-469.
Joshua Elliott et al. "Propagation of data error and parametric sensitivity in computable general equilibrium models." Computational Economics 39, no. 3 (2012): 219-241.
Elliott, Joshua, Ian Foster, Kenneth Judd, Elisabeth Moyer, and Todd Munson. "CIM-EARTH: Framework and case study." The BE Journal of Economic Analysis & Policy 10, no. 2 (2010).
Margaret S. Loudermilk et al. "Computable General Equilibrium Analysis of Economic Policies on the US Biofuels Market." Instruments for Green Futures Markets (2011): 7.
Choi, Sou-Cheng T., and Todd Munson. "OSCEF: the open-source CIM-EARTH framework user manual for version 1.0." Technical Report ANL/MCS-TM-339, Argonne National Laboratory, March 2014.
Joshua Elliott et al. "Modeling of Land-Use Changes & Other Indirect Effects of Biofuel Production in CIM-EARTH." Prepared for the U.S. Department of Energy Biomass Program, Final Report October 2011.
Joshua Elliott et al. "CIM-EARTH: Community Integrated Model of Economic and Resource Trajectories for Humankind." Mathematics and Computer Science Division Technical Memorandum ANL/MCS-TM-307.
Joshua Elliott et al. "Modeling of Land-Use Changes and Other Indirect Effects of Biofuel Production in CIM-EARTH." DOE Office of Biomass Program (2012).
Joshua Elliott et al. "Impact on US Gasoline Prices of Eliminating Biofuels Production: An Equilibrium Analysis," February 2012. RDCEP Policy Analysis Paper No. 12-02.


Alan Sanstad

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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

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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

publications
Joshua Elliott et al. "Predicting Agricultural Impacts of Large-Scale Drought: 2012 and the Case for Better Modeling" (2013). RDCEP Working Paper Series No. 13-01.
Frigg, Roman, Leonard A. Smith, and David A. Stainforth. "The myopia of imperfect climate models: the case of UKCP09." Philosophy of science 80, no. 5 (2013): 886-897.
Roman Frigg, Seamus Bradley, Hailiang Du, and Leonard A Smith. Laplaces demon and the adventures of his apprentices. Philosophy of Science, 81(1):31–59, 2014.
Roman Frigg et al. "Probabilistic forecasting: Why model imperfection is a poison pill." New Challenges to Philosophy of Science. Springer Netherlands; (2013):479-491.
Roman Frigg, Leonard A Smith, and David A Stainforth. An assessment of the foundational assumptions in high-resolution climate projections: the case of ukcp09. Synthese, pages 1–30, 2015.
W Hazeleger, BJJM Van den Hurk, E Min, GJ Van Oldenborgh, AC Petersen, DA Stainforth, E Vasileiadou, and LA Smith. Tales of future weather. Nature Climate Change, 5(2):107–113, 2015.
Ana Lopez, Emma B Suckling, and Leonard A Smith. Robustness of pattern scaled climate change scenarios for adaptation decision support. Climatic change, 122(4):555–566, 2014
Lopez, Ana, Emma B. Suckling, and Leonard A. Smith. "Robustness of pattern scaled climate change scenarios for adaptation decision support." Climatic change 122, no. 4 (2014): 555-566.
Daniel J. Rowlands et al. "Broad range of 2050 warming from an observationally constrained large climate model ensemble." Nature Geoscience 5, no. 4 (2012): 256-260.
Leonard A. Smith and Arthur Petersen. Variations on reliability: Connecting climate predictions to climate policy. Error and Uncertainty in Scientific Practice, 2014
Leonard A. Smith, Hailiang Du, Emma B. Suckling, and Falk Niehrster. Probabilistic skill in ensemble seasonal forecasts. Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society, 2014.
Smith, Leonard A., Hailiang Du, Emma B. Suckling, and Falk Niehrster. "Probabilistic skill in ensemble seasonal forecasts." Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society (2014).
Leonard A. Smith et al. "Variations on reliability: Connecting climate predictions to climate policy." Error and uncertainty in scientific practice. London, UK: Pickering & Chatto; (2014):137-156.
Stainforth, David A., and Leonard A. Smith. "Policy: Clarify the limits of climate models." Nature 489, no. 7415 (2012): 208-208.
Suckling, Emma B., and Leonard A. Smith. "An Evaluation of Decadal Probability Forecasts from State-of-the-Art Climate Models*." Journal of Climate 26, no. 23 (2013): 9334-9347.
Keith Beven et al. "On virtual observatories and modelled realities (or why discharge must be treated as a virtual variable)." Hydrological Processes 26, no. 12 (2012): 1905-1908.
S Bradley et al. Model error and ensemble forecasting: a cautionary tale. Selected Papers from the International Conference on SEMS 2012, World Scientific, 2014.
Hailiang Du and Leonard A Smith. Pseudo-orbit data assimilation. part i: The perfect model scenario. Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences, 71(2):469–482, 2014.
Du, Hailiang, and Leonard A. Smith. "Parameter estimation through ignorance." Physical Review E 86, no. 1 (2012): 016213.
Hailiang Du and Leonard A. Smith. Beyond proper score: The importance of being local. in preparation for Annals of Statistics, 2016

Michael Stein

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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

Publications (RDCEP-1)
W. K. Huang, et al. Estimating changes in temperature extremes from millennial scale climate simulations using generalized extreme value (gev) distributions. 2016.
Richard Katz et al. "Uncertainty analysis in climate change assessments." Nature Climate Change 3, no. 9 (2013): 769-771.
W. B. Leeds, E. J. Moyer, and M. L. Stein. Simulation of future climate under changing temporal covariance structures. Advances in Statistical Climatology Meteorology and Oceanography, 1(1):1–14, 2015
Andrew Poppick, et al. Temperatures in transient climates: improved methods for simulations with evolving temporal covariances. arXiv preprint arXiv:1507.00683, 2015.
M. L. Stein. Should annual maximum temperatures follow a gev distribution? Submitted to Biometrika, 2016.
Shanshan Sun, Scott Collis, Beth Drewniak, David Cook, Michael Stein, and Elizabeth Moyer. Soil moisture dynamics in observation and models in southern great plains. in preparation, 2016.
Ying Sun and Michael L Stein. A stochastic space-time model for intermittent precipitation occurrences. Annals of Applied Statistics, 2015.
J. Bao, D. McInerney, and M. L. Stein. A spatial dependent model for climate emulation. Revision submitted to Environmetrics., 2016.
Stefano Castruccio et al. "Statistical Emulation of Climate Model Projections Based on Precomputed GCM Runs*." Journal of Climate 27, no. 5 (2014): 1829-1844.
Castruccio, Stefano, and Michael L. Stein. "Global space-time models for climate ensembles." The Annals of Applied Statistics 7, no. 3 (2013): 1593-1611.
Won Chang, et al. Changes in spatio- temporal precipitation patterns in changing climate conditions. arXiv preprint arXiv:1601.01147, 2016.

Jevgenijs Steinbuks

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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

recent publications
Hertel, Thomas, Jevgenijs Steinbuks, and Uris Baldos. "Competition for Land in the Global Bioeconomy" (September 10, 2012). RDCEP Working Paper No. 12-12.
T. W. Hertel, J. Steinbuks, W.E. Tyner . What is the social value of second generation biofuels? Applied Economic Perspectives and Policies, forthcoming, 2015.
Hertel, Thomas, Jevgenijs Steinbuks, and Uris Baldos. "Competition for land in the global bioeconomy." Agricultural Economics 44, no. s1 (2013): 129-138.
Thomas W Hertel, Jevgenijs Steinbuks, and Wallace E Tyner. What is the social value of second generation biofuels? Applied Economic Perspectives and Policy, page ppv027, 2015.
Steinbuks, Jevgenijs. "Energy prices will drive global land use in the 21st century." Environmental Research Web, April 2013. Insight Article.
Steinbuks, Jevgenijs, and Govinda R. Timilsina. "Land-use change and food supply." The Impacts of Biofuels on the Economy, Environment, and Poverty, Springer New York. (2014): 91-102.
Jevgenijs Steinbuks and Thomas W. Hertel. Confronting the food-energy-environment trilemma: Global land use in the long run. forthcoming in Environmental and Resource Economics, 2015
Steinbuks, Jevgenijs, and Thomas W. Hertel. "The Optimal Allocation of Global Land Use in the Food-Energy-Environment Trilemma" (January 26, 2012). RDCEP Working Paper No. 12-01.
Jevgenijs Steinbuks et al. "Optimal Path for Global Land Use under Climate Change Uncertainty." In 2013 Annual Meeting, August 4-6, 2013, Washington, DC, no. 151413. AAEA, 2013.
Steinbuks, Jevgenijs, & Thomas W. Hertel. "Energy prices will play an important role in determining global land use in the twenty first century."Environmental Research Letters 8, no. 1 (2013): 014014.
Steinbuks, Jevgenijs, and Thomas W. Hertel. "Confronting the Food-Energy-Environment Trilemma: Global Land Use in the Long Run." Environmental and Resource Economics (2012): 1-26.
Y. Cai, et al. The effect of uncertainty in crop yields on the optimal path of global land use. R&R in Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, 2016.
Y Cai et al. The effect of climate and technological uncertainty in crop yields on the optimal path of global land use. 7009, World Bank Policy Research Working Paper Series, 2014.
Yongyang Cai et al. "The Effect of Climate and Technological Uncertainty in Crop Yields on the Optimal Path of global land use." World Bank Policy Research Working Paper 7009 (2014).
Y. Cai, K.L. Judd, and J. Steinbuks. A nonlinear certainty equivalent approximation method for dynamic stochastic problems. forthcoming in Quantitative Economics, 2016

David Weisbach

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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

recent publications
Joshua Elliott et al. "Unilateral carbon taxes, border adjustments, and carbon leakage." Theoretical Inquiries in Law 14 (2013): 207-243.
Elliott, Joshua, Ian Foster, Samuel Kortum, Gita Khun Jush, Todd Munson, and David Weisbach. "Unilateral Carbon Taxes Border Adjustments and Carbon Leakage" (2012). RDCEP Working Paper No. 12-04.
Elliott, Joshua, Ian Foster, Samuel Kortum, Todd Munson, Fernando Perez Cervantes, and David Weisbach. "Trade and carbon taxes." The American Economic Review (2010): 465-469.
Kaplow, Louis, and David Weisbach. "Discount rates, social judgments, individuals' risk preferences, and uncertainty." Journal of Risk and Uncertainty 42, no. 2 (2011): 125-143.
Louis Kaplow et al. "The social evaluation of intergenerational policies & its application to integrated assessment models of climate change."BE Journal of Economic Analysis & Policy 10, no. 2 (2010).
Elisabeth Moyer et al. "Climate impacts on economic growth as drivers of uncertainty in the social cost of carbon." University of Chicago Coase-Sandor Institute for Law & Economics Paper 652 (2013).
E J Moyer, M D Woolley, N J Matteson, M J Glotter, and D A Weisbach. Climate impacts on economic growth as drivers of uncertainty in the social cost of carbon. The Journal of Legal Studies, 2014
Elisabeth J. Moyer et al. "Climate Impacts on Economic Growth as Drivers of Uncertainty in the Social Cost of Carbon. " The Journal of Legal Studies 43, no. 2 (2014).
Posner, Eric A., and David A. Weisbach. "International paretianism: a defense." Chicago Journal of International Law 13. (2013): 348-358.
David Weisbach and Stephen Gardiner. Debating Climate Change. Oxford University Press, forthcoming, 2015.
Weisbach, David A. "Designing Subsidies for Low Carbon Energy." Journal of Environmental and Sustainablility Law 20 (2013): 1.
David A Weisbach. Distributionally weighted cost–benefit analysis: Welfare economics meets organizational design. Journal of Legal Analysis, 2014.
Weisbach David A. "Carbon taxation in the EU: expanding the EU carbon price." Journal of Environmental Law 24. (2012): 183-206.
Weisbach David A. "Negligence, strict liability, and responsibility for climate change." Iowa Law Review 97. (2012): 521-565.
Weisbach David A. "Should environmental taxes be precautionary?" National Tax Journal 65. (2012): 453-474.
Weisbach David A. "Instrument Choice is Instrument Design." In: Metcalf G U.S. Energy Tax Policy. Gilbert Metcalf ed. U.S. Energy Tax Policy. Cambridge University Press; 2011.

Victor Zhorin

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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

Ian Foster

/ University of Chicago/

Principal Investigator, RDCEP 

Arthur Holly Compton Distinguished Service Professor, Department of Computer Science, University of Chicago

Director, Computation Institute, Argonne National Laboratory and University of Chicago    

Associate Director, Mathematics and Computer Science Division, Argonne National Laboratory

 

Areas of Expertise:

  • Computer Science: Collaborative computing
  • Computer Science: Grid computing
  • Computer Science: High-performance computing

Foster develops tools and techniques that allow people to use high-performance computers in innovative ways. He co-invented grid computing, which has become the de facto computation standard for data-intensive, mutli-institution collaboration. As director of the Computation Institute, Foster brings together computational scientists and discipline thought leaders to work on a wide range of projects, with computation as a key component. He oversees the Distributed Systems Laboratory (DSL), which operates at both the University of Chicago and at Argonne National Laboratory. The DSL serves as the nexus of the multi-institutional Globus Project, a research and development effort that provides the advances required to make collaborative computing successful in science, engineering, business and other areas. Globus technologies are used by thousands of researchers worldwide and form the basis of several dozen national and international collaborative computing projects.

In March 2006, Foster was appointed director of the Computation Institute, a joint project between the University and Argonne that addresses the most challenging computational and communications problems arising from a broad range of intellectual pursuits.

Foster's honors include the Lovelace Medal of the British Computer Society and the Gordon Bell Prize for high-performance supercomputing.

Research Projects

FACE-IT | pSIMS | Parched Earth | Shadowing | CIM-EARTH | SOLE | GGCMI | Evaluating the utility of dynamical downscaling in agricultural impacts projections | InterSectoral Impacts Model Intercomparison and Improvement Project (ISI-MIP) | 

Former Students and Postdoctoral Scholars

Sou-Cheng Choi | Quan Tran Pham | Adriana Ciccone | Jeremy Archer

Publications
Joshua Elliott et al. The parallel system for integrating impact models and sectors (pSIMS). Proceedings of XSEDE '13: Gateway to Discovery. 2013; (Article No. 21).
Joshua Elliott et al. "Unilateral carbon taxes, border adjustments, and carbon leakage." Theoretical Inquiries in Law 14 (2013): 207-243.
Joshua Elliott et al. "Impact on US Gasoline Prices of Eliminating Biofuels Production: An Equilibrium Analysis" (2012). RDCEP Working Paper No. 12-05, Argonne National Laboratory, 2011.
Elliott, Joshua, Ian Foster, Samuel Kortum, Gita Khun Jush, Todd Munson, and David Weisbach. "Unilateral Carbon Taxes Border Adjustments and Carbon Leakage" (2012). RDCEP Working Paper No. 12-04.
J. Elliott et al. The global gridded crop model intercomparison: data and modeling protocols for phase 1 (v1.0). Geoscientific Model Development, 8(2):261–277, 2015.
Joshua Elliott et al. "Predicting Agricultural Impacts of Large-Scale Drought: 2012 and the Case for Better Modeling" (2013). RDCEP Working Paper Series No. 13-01.
Elliott, Joshua, Margaret Loudermilk, Nirupama Rao, Ian Foster, Don Fullerton, & Todd Munson. "Building a Custom Initialization Data Product for a Life-cycle OLG Model." GTAP Working Paper. June 2011.
Elliott, Joshua, Ian Foster, Samuel Kortum, Todd Munson, Fernando Perez Cervantes, and David Weisbach. "Trade and carbon taxes." The American Economic Review (2010): 465-469.
Joshua Elliott et al. "Propagation of data error and parametric sensitivity in computable general equilibrium models." Computational Economics 39, no. 3 (2012): 219-241.
Elliott, Joshua, Ian Foster, Kenneth Judd, Elisabeth Moyer, and Todd Munson. "CIM-EARTH: Framework and case study." The BE Journal of Economic Analysis & Policy 10, no. 2 (2010).
Ian Foster et al. "FACE-IT: Framework to Advance Climate, Economics, and Impact Investigations with Information Technology." In AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts, vol. 1, p. 1618. 2013.
Michael Glotter et al. "Evaluating the utility of dynamical downscaling in agricultural impacts projections." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 111, no. 24 (2014): 8776-8781.
Michael Glotter et al. Evaluating the utility of dynamical downscaling in agricultural impacts projections. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 111(24):8776–8781, 2014.
Margaret S. Loudermilk et al. "Computable General Equilibrium Analysis of Economic Policies on the US Biofuels Market." Instruments for Green Futures Markets (2011): 7.
Malik, Tanu, Quan Pham and Ian Foster. "SOLE: Towards Descriptive and Interactive Publications." Implementing Reproducible Research. Chapman & Hall/CRC; (2014).
Montella, R. et al. (2015) FACE-IT: A science gateway for food security research. Concurrency & Computation: Practice & Experience
R Montella et al. Face-it: A science gateway for food security research. Proceedings of the 9th Gateway Computing Environments Workshop, 2014
Morin, Andrew, Jennifer M. Urban, Paul D. Adams, Ian Foster, Andrej Sali, David Baker, and Piotr Sliz. "Shining light into black boxes." Science (New York, NY) 336, no. 6078 (2012): 159.
Quan Pham et al. "SOLE: linking research papers with science objects." In Provenance and Annotation of Data and Processes, Springer Berlin Heidelberg, (2012): 203-208.
Q Pham, T Malik, and I Foster. Auditing and maintaining provenance in software packages. In Provenance and Annotation of Data and Processes, 2014.
Best, Neil, Joshua Elliott, and Ian Foster. "Synthesis of a Complete Land Use/Land Cover Dataset for the Conterminous United States" (May 4, 2012). RDCEP Working Paper No. 12-08.
K Chard et al. Globus data publication as a service: Lowering barriers to reproducible science. 11th IEEE International Conference on eScience, 2015
Joshua Elliott et al. "Modeling of Land-Use Changes & Other Indirect Effects of Biofuel Production in CIM-EARTH." Prepared for the U.S. Department of Energy Biomass Program, Final Report October 2011.
Joshua Elliott et al. The parallel system for integrating impact models and sectors (psims). Environmental Modelling & Software, 62:509–516, 2014.
Joshua Elliott et al. "A spatial modeling framework to evaluate domestic biofuel-induced potential land use changes and emissions." Environmental science & technology 48, no. 4 (2014): 2488-2496.
Joshua Elliott et al. "CIM-EARTH: Community Integrated Model of Economic and Resource Trajectories for Humankind." Mathematics and Computer Science Division Technical Memorandum ANL/MCS-TM-307.
Joshua Elliott et al. "Modeling of Land-Use Changes and Other Indirect Effects of Biofuel Production in CIM-EARTH." DOE Office of Biomass Program (2012).
Joshua Elliott et al. "Impact on US Gasoline Prices of Eliminating Biofuels Production: An Equilibrium Analysis," February 2012. RDCEP Policy Analysis Paper No. 12-02.

Alison Brizius

/

Executive Director, Center for Robust Decision making on Climate and Energy Policy

Computation Institute

University of Chicago and Argonne National Laboratory

 

Alison Brizius is the Executive Director of the Center for Robust Decision making on Climate and Energy Policy and a member of the Computation Institute at the University of Chicago and Argonne National Laboratory.  Alison's interests center on developing innovative and sustainable approaches to improving the quality and accessibility of scientific information for public policy decision-making. Prior to joining RDCEP, she was the policy and special projects manager for the Chicago Council on Science and Technology (C2ST).  There she led a broad range of activities designed to increase public understanding of science policy issues of national importance.  Alison received her Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Chicago in 2011 where she helped design, construct, test and analyze data from a microwave telescope and detector array based at the Chajnantor Observatory, in San Pedro de Atacama, Chile.  This experiment (QUIET) was designed to measure the polarization of the cosmic microwave background radiation, the characteristics of which have the potential to elucidate the structure and evolution of the early universe.  She received her B.S. in Physics from Stanford University and her M.S. in Physics from the University of Chicago.  

Research Projects

FACE-IT | webDICE | Energy Inventory | Chicago Climate Online | Climate Emulator | RPS

Recent RDCEP Publications:

Recent RDCEP Presentations and Workshops:

  • “FACE-IT: Framework to Advance Climate Economic and Impacts Investigations with Information Technology.” Next Generation Agricultural Systems Models Part 2, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Washington, D.C. January 29, 2015.
  • “Introduction to FACE-IT for AgMIP.” AgMIP Phase 2 Fundamentals Workshop, Victoria Falls, Zimbabwe. June 29, 2015.
  • "Information intensive research initiatives at the Center of Robust Decision making on Climate and Energy Policy." Workshop on Research Information Technologies and their Role in Advancing Science, University of Chicago, May 2014.