Undergraduate, Program in Environmental Sciences, Northwestern University
Summer Research Assistant, RDCEP
Chris is a senior environmental science major at Northwestern University, working as a research intern for RDCEP in the summer of 2017. His research interests are varied, ranging from general climate statistics to more specific areas like the attribution of extreme events.
Yenching Academy, Peking University
Pre-doc, RDCEP
Kevin has a BA in Physics and Public Policy from the University Chicago and a Master's in China Studies at Peking University, where he researched the effect of Chinese fiscal structures on urban expansion. His research focuses on analyzing climate model output, projected changes in climate variability, and the impact of climate variability on society. In his spare time, he co-runs an interdisciplinary meet-up group designed to connect young natural and social scientists researching climate and energy matters and blogs about urban policy.
Ph.D. Candidate, Department of Computer Science
University of Chicago
Postdoctoral Research Associate, Dartmouth
Postdoctoral Scholar, Department of Statistics
University of Chicago
I currently do research on extreme event characterization, modeling and forecasting using geological data like climate models and observations. For example, are days of extreme temperatures getting more frequent? Or is the annual temperature profile more variable with the current post-industrial climate forcings compared to the pre-industrial era? To answer these questions I look at climate model output, e.g. Global Circulation Models, using different starting conditions and see how their behavior changes statistically.
Related to this is also the desire to incorporate a more statistical framework with the current deterministic climate models. This involves for example adaptive grid sizes and time steps dependent on desired spatio-temporal resolution.
Graduate Student, Department of Statistics at Purdue University
Whitney Huang is a fouth year PhD Student in the Department of Statistics at Purdue University. He is working on Spatial Extremes and Spatio-Temporal Statistics under Prof. Hao Zhang. He received his Bachelors degree in Mechanical engineering from National Cheng Kung University, Taiwan and his Master degree in Statistics from University of Akron, Ohio.
Postdoctoral Scholar, Department of Geophysical Sciences, University of Chicago
Chen received her PhD in Climatology from the department of earth and environmental sciences at Columbia University, and is currently involved at the Center for Robust Decision Making on Climate and Energy Policy at Computation Institute, as well as the research network of statistical methods for atmospheric and oceanic sciences.
Her research interests include climate variabilities and impacts, climate change sensitivity, modeling and diagnostics, predictability and forecast, geophysical fluid dynamics (rotating horizontal convection).
PhD Student, University of Naples, Parthenope
Diana is currently a PhD student for Raffaele Montella at the University of Naples, Parthenope.
Research Projects:
Postdoctoral appointee, Climate & Atmospheric Science Department, Argonne National Laboratory
Jiali received her Ph.D. in Atmospheric Science from the Institute of Atmospheric Physics at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2012.
Her capabilities include: downscaling of climate models to regional and local scales; big data analysis; regional modeling of atmospheric physics and extreme climate/weather events; evaluation of model performance by applying statistical technologies; assessment of urban climate impacts.
Graduate Student, University of Chicago
Ricardo Barros Lourenço is a CS Ph.D. Student at the University of Chicago. He holds an MSc. in Predictive Analytics at DePaul University, also awarded a scholarship of Brazil Scientific Mobility Program (“Ciência sem Fronteiras”) from CAPES Foundation / Brazilian Ministry of Education. He received a BA in Image and Sound from the Federal University of São Carlos. While a student of Geology at State University of Campinas (UNICAMP), has worked with Airborne Geophysics and Seismic Data Processing.
He is a Research Assistant at the Computation Institute (a joint-venture from University of Chicago and Argonne National Laboratory) working with the Center for Robust Decision Making on Climate and Energy Policy (RDCEP) and Globus Labs teams.
He is interested in problems comprehending large-scale geospatial data acquisition, integration, and processing, involving machine learning and computer vision methods implemented in High-Performance Computing facilities.
Research Interests:
Current Projects:
Postdoctoral Scholar, Department of Geosciences, Penn State University
Research Interests:
Associate Professor, Department of Economics, Northern Illinois University
Areas of Expertise:
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.
Vilas Research Professor, Emeritus of Economics, University of Wisconsin, Madison
Research Professor, University of Missouri, Columbia
Areas of Expertise:
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.
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:
Current Research Project at RDCEP:
Publications:
Senior Research Scientist, Becker Friedman Institute, University of Chicago
Visiting the Hoover Institution, Stanford University
Areas of Expertise:
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.
Dynamic stochastic integrated assessment modeling | FABLE | | DSICE | Model uncertainty and energy technology policy
Research Scientist, Computation Institute, University of Chicago
Areas of Expertise:
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 Economist in Climate Policy, Center for Global Trade Analysis (GTAP)
Purdue University
Areas of Expertise:
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.
Assistant Professor of Geography, Dartmouth
Co-PI, RDCEP (2010 - 2015)
Research Director, Becker Friedman Institute
David Rockefeller Distinguished Service Professor
Department of Economics, University of Chicago
Areas of Expertise:
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.
Robustness in Economic Models With Climate Change
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.
