Christine Chung
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Masters Student, Computational Analysis and Public Policy, Harris School of Public Policy, University of Chicago
Severin Thaler
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Graduate Student, Department of Computer Science, University of Chicago
Severin Thaler received a MSc in Mathematics from ETH Zurich with a focus on Numerical Analysis and is currently a PhD candidate at the Department of Computer Science at the University of Chicago. He is contributing to the implementation of a platform allowing storage, analysis, and visualization of large-scale climate data with the goal of raising awareness on climate change and ultimately to convince policy-makers.
Research Interests:
- Spatio-Temporal Databases
- Distributed Systems
- Machine Learning
- Climate Analysis
Current Projects: EDE
Shanshan Sun
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Postdoctoral Scholar, Department of the Geophysical Sciences, University of Chicago
Sun’s current research focuses on studying the transient climate behaviors and the physical mechanisms governing them using both state-of-the-art General Circulation Models (GCMs) and one-column models which are computationally efficient. She also maintains and helps build the library of transient climates from GCM outputs.
Sun received her PhD from University of Connecticut in 2012.
Research Interests:
- Transient climate evolutions and its potential causes
- Land-atmosphere interaction
- Ocean-atmosphere interaction and its impacts on land-atmosphere interaction
- Dynamic vegetation’s role in the climate system
Research Projects:
Soil Moisture | Climate Variability: statistics and observation based simulations | Shadowing | Climate variability: effect of model spatial resolution
Evan Anderson
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Associate Professor, Department of Economics, Northern Illinois University
Areas of Expertise:
- Financial Economics
- Macroeconomics
- Computational Economics
Professor Anderson received his PhD from the University of Chicago in 1998. Prior to joining Northern Illinois University, he held a position at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His recent research has focused on risk sharing when agents have risk-sensitive preferences, and on the implications of heterogeneous beliefs for asset pricing.
Research Projects
William Brock
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Vilas Research Professor, Emeritus of Economics, University of Wisconsin, Madison
Research Professor, University of Missouri, Columbia
Areas of Expertise:
- Complex dynamics in economics
- Mathematical economics
Brock is the Vilas Research Professor of Economics, Emeritus at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, where he has taught economics since 1975. Brock received his PhD in Mathematics from the University of California, Berkeley. He is well known for his contributions to the theory of optimal growth, the breadth of applications of the intertemporal model to economics, and other aspects of nonlinear dynamics.
Brock has been a Fellow of the Academy of Arts and Sciences since 1992, a member of the National Academy of Sciences since 1998, and a Distinguished Fellow of the American Economics Association since 2004.
Research Projects
Robustness in Economic Models with Climate Change | Heat Balance Climate Models
Recent Publications
William Brock, Lars Peter Hansen Wrestling with Uncertainty in Climate Economic Models, October 9, 2017, SSRN. (lecture on this paper here)
Brock, W. and A. Xepapadeas. 2017. Climate Change Policy Under Polar Amplification. European Economic Review 94:263-282.
Cai, Y., W. Brock, and A. Xepapadeas. 2016. Climate Change Economics and Heat
Transport Across the Globe: Spatial-DSICE. In 2017 Allied Social Science Association
(ASSA) Annual Meeting, January 6-8, 2017, Chicago, Illinois, 251833. Agricultural and
Applied Economics Association
Anderson, E. W., W. A. Brock, and A. Sanstad. 2016. Robust Consumption and Energy
Decisions. Working paper, SSRN.
Carpenter, S., Brock, W., Folke, C., Van Ness, E., Scheffer, M., 2015,
“Allowing variance may enlarge the safe operating space for exploited
ecosystems,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, USA, 112(46):14384-14389
forthcoming in Handbook of Environmental Economics, Partha Dasgupta et al., eds., Elsevier: North Holland.
Won Chang
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Professor, Department of Statistics, University of Cincinnati
Won Chang is currently a professor at the University of Cincinnati. Before this new appointment, Won was a postdoctoral scholar in Department of Statistics at the University of Chicago. His research focuses on statistical methods for simulating important aspects of future climate such as storm patterns and sea level changes. The statistical challenges of this work involve performing conditional simulation and climate model calibration using high-dimensional and non-Gaussian space-time data.
Research Interests:
- Big data issues in climate research:
- Modeling non-Gaussian and high-dimensional space-time data
- Climate model emulation and calibration
- Conditional simulation of climate processes
Current Research Project at RDCEP:
Publications:
- Chang, W., Haran, M., Applegate, P.J., Pollard, D. (2015) Calibrating an ice sheet model using high-dimensional non-Gaussian spatial data, accepted for publication in Journal of the American Statistical Association.
- Chang, W., Haran, M., Olson, R., and Keller, K. (2015) A composite likelihood approach to computer model calibration with high-dimensional spatial data, Statistica Sinica, 25 (1), 243-260
- Chang, W., Haran, M., Olson, R., and Keller, K. (2014) Fast dimension-reduced climate model calibration and the effect of data aggregation, the Annals of Applied Statistics, 8 (2), 649-673 (Winner of the 2014 American Statistical Association Section on Statistics and the Environment Student Paper Competition)
- Chang, W., Applegate, P.J., Haran, M. and Keller, K. (2014) Probabilistic calibration of a Greenland Ice Sheet model using spatially-resolved synthetic observations: toward projections of ice mass loss with uncertainties, Geoscientific Model Development, 7, 1933-1943
- Olson, R., Sriver, R., Chang, W., Haran, M., Urban, N.M., Keller, K. (2013) What is the effect of unresolved internal climate variability on climate sensitivity estimates?, Journal of Geophysical Research - Atmospheres, 118 (10), 4348-4358
Yongyang Cai
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Senior Research Scientist, Becker Friedman Institute, University of Chicago
Visiting the Hoover Institution, Stanford University
Areas of Expertise:
- Dynamic programming and numerical methods
- Algorithms and applications of mathematical programming in economics, finance and climate change
Cai's research focuses on numerical dynamic programming and its applications in economics, finance and climate change. He has developed several numerical dynamic programming algorithms and a software package for high-dimensional dynamic programming problems with both continuous and discrete states and controls. Examples include optimal growth problems and dynamic portfolio optimization problems. He is currently working on applications of numerical dynamic programming algorithms for solving integrated assessment models of climate and economics with uncertainty.
Cai completed his PhD in 2010 at the Institute for Computational & Mathematical Engineering at Stanford University.
Research Projects
Dynamic stochastic integrated assessment modeling | FABLE | | DSICE | Model uncertainty and energy technology policy
Hailiang Du
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Research Scientist, Computation Institute, University of Chicago
Areas of Expertise:
- Analysis and prediction of nonlinear systems
- Data Assimilation
- Parameter estimation
- Forecast interpretation and evaluation
Hailiang's research ranges from the advancement of the theory of nonlinear dynamical systems to the application of these insights in the context of large-scale numerical models including weather and climate. He is particularly interested in advancing the understanding of predictability in the context of those models, and better understanding the dynamics, analysis, and interpretation (for decision support) of climate models in general. His previous research work includes parameter estimation via examining the dynamical consistency of the model and via probabilistic skill score; advancing pseudo-orbit data assimilation approach for state estimation; evaluating probabilistic skill in real world ensemble forecasts, and forecast interpretation using sustainable odds.
Hailiang received his PhD in statistics from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) in 2009. He held post-doctoral positions within the Centre for Climate Change Economics and Policy and the Centre for the Analysis of Time Series at LSE before joining RDCEP at the University of Chicago in 2014.
Research Projects
Michael Glotter
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Researcher, RDCEP
AAAS Fellow, Office of US Senator Al Franken
Alla Golub
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Research Economist in Climate Policy, Center for Global Trade Analysis (GTAP)
Purdue University
Areas of Expertise:
- Economic modeling
- Climate change economics
Golub is Research Economist with the Center for Global Trade Analysis (GTAP), Department of Agricultural Economics, Purdue University.
She graduated from Purdue in 2006 with Ph.D. in Agricultural Economics.
Jonathan Winter
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Assistant Professor of Geography, Dartmouth
Lars Peter Hansen
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Co-PI, RDCEP (2010 - 2015)
Research Director, Becker Friedman Institute
David Rockefeller Distinguished Service Professor
Department of Economics, University of Chicago
Areas of Expertise:
- Methodology: Econometrics
- Economics: Asset Pricing
Hansen is a recipient of the 2013 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel for his early research. Hansen shares this honor with Eugene Fama and Robert Shiller.
Hansen's work explores formal implications of dynamic economic models in which decision makers face uncertain environments. The main theme of his research has been to devise and apply econometric methods that are consistent with the probabilistic framework of the economic models under investigation. His work has implications for consumption, savings investment, and asset pricing.
Hansen's early research in econometrics was aimed at developing time series statistical methods to investigate one part of an economic model without having to fully specify and estimate all of the model ingredients. The applications he explored with several coauthors included systems that are rich enough to support models of asset valuation and to identify and clarify empirical puzzles, where real-world financial and economic data were at odds with prevailing academic models.
He continues to explore, analyze, and interpret implications of dynamic economic models in environments with uncertainty from a time-series perspective. His recent research explores ways to quantify intertemporal risk-return tradeoffs and ways to model economic behavior when decision makers are uncertain about how to forecast future economic events.
Hansen is a fellow of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Finance Association. He is also a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and past president of the Econometric Society. Hansen is a former John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellow and Sloan Foundation Fellow.
Hansen won the 2010 BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in the Economics, Finance and Management "for making fundamental contributions to our understanding of how economic actors cope with risky and changing environments." In 2008, Hansen was awarded the CME Group-MSRI Prize in Innovative Quantitative Applications. This award is designed to recognize individuals or groups who contribute original concepts and innovation in the use of mathematical, statistical or computational methods for the study of the behavior of markets, and more broadly of economics. Hansen is one of two scholars to receive the prestigious 2006 Nemmers Prizes in economics and mathematics, believed to be the largest monetary awards in the United States for outstanding achievements in those two disciplines.
Research Projects
Robustness in Economic Models With Climate Change
Former Students
Thomas Hertel
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Distinguished Professor, Agricultural Economics, Purdue University Executive Director and Founder, Center for Global Trade Analysis
Areas of Expertise:
Climate change impacts and mitigation
Global land use change
Global food security and environmental change
Thomas Hertel is Distinguished Professor of Agricultural Economics at Purdue University, where his research and teaching focus on international trade, climate change, food and environmental security. Dr. Hertel is a Fellow, and a Past-President, of the Agricultural and Applied Economics Association (AAEA). He is also a fellow of the AAAS (2018). Hertel is the founder and Executive Director of the Global Trade Analysis Project (GTAP) which now encompasses more than 15,000 researchers in 170 countries around the world (www.gtap.org). This Project maintains a global economic data base and an applied general equilibrium modeling framework which are documented in the book: Global Trade Analysis: Modeling and Applications, edited by Dr. Hertel, and published by Cambridge University Press. He has supervised more than forty PhD students and published more than 120 peer reviewed journal articles, along with several dozen book chapters as well as four books. Professor Hertel is the inaugural recipient of the Purdue University Research and Scholarship Distinction Award. He has also received a number of AAEA awards including: Publication of Enduring Quality, Distinguished Policy Contribution, Outstanding Journal Article and Quality of Communication. He has also been Advisor to two Outstanding AAEA PhD and MS theses.
Research Projects
Students
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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Assistant Professor, Penn State University
Researcher, RDCEP
Ph.D., University of California, Santa Cruz, 2012
Research Interests
- Hydrogeology
- Agricultural water management
- Managed recharge
Robert Jacob
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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
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.
