James Rising

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James Rising 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.  Dr. Rising draws upon analytical and empirical approaches from multiple fields and develops computational and statistical models to understand integrated global challenges.  Prior to joining the University of Chicago, he was a postdoctoral fellow at the Energy & Resources Group at UC Berkeley after receiving his Ph.D. from Columbia University's program in Sustainable Development.  He previously taught within MIT's Experimental Study Group and at Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering. Until recently, he worked as a software developer, working with over a dozen companies on audio and video processing, social networks, and artificial intelligence.

 


 

Jim Franke

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Jim Franke graduated from the Milwaukee School of Engineering with a degree in mechanical engineering. After working in industry as an energy engineer for 5 years, he joined the PhD program in Geophysical Science at the University of Chicago in 2017. He is currently studying climate change impacts on human populations.

Research interests: climate change impacts and food security

Elisabeth Moyer

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Co-PI, RDCEP

Associate Professor, Department of the Geophysical Sciences, University of Chicago

Areas of Expertise:

  • Measurement and study of atmospheric water vapor
  • Human dimensions of climate change
  • Isotope geochemistry, optical spectroscopy and spectroscopic instrumentation

Moyer researches the processes that control the distribution of water vapor and formation of cirrus clouds in the upper troposphere and stratosphere, which provides important insights on climate change and ozone destruction.

In November 2010, Moyer was selected for one of eight awards from the Dreyfus Foundation Postdoctoral Program in Environmental Chemistry, which will support her work on ice nucleation and cloud microphysics using a novel spectrometer and the AIDA cloud simulation chamber (Aerosol Interaction and Dynamics in the Atmosphere) in Karlsruhe, Germany.

Moyer received her PhD in Planetary Science from the California Institute of Technology. From 2001 to 2007 she was a member of the Department of Chemistry at Harvard University, first as a NOAA Postdoctoral Fellow in Global Change Science and subsequently as a research associate. She has participated in atmospheric science field campaigns on NASA's high-altitude research aircraft since 1997. Moyer is a member of the American Geophysical Union and the American Chemical Society.

Research Projects

Climate Variability | Climate Emulation | Transient Climate Studies | Soil Moisture | Social Cost of Carbon

Students and Postdoctoral Scholars

Jim Franke | Kevin Schwarzwald

Former Students and Postdoctoral Scholars

David McInerney | Bill Leeds | Mark Woolley | FeiFei Crouch | Rachel Atlas | Anne Laski | Sean Johnson | Aman Chitkara | David Plotkin | Peter Hansen | Grant Wilder | Shanshan Sun | Won Chang | Michael Glotter | Jeremy Klavans | Hsin-Yi Chen | Mark He | Aidan Sadowski

RDCEP Publications
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).
Michael Glotter et al. "A simple carbon cycle representation for economic & policy analyses." Working Paper 13-04, Center for Robust Decision Making on Climate and Energy Policy, September 2013.
Michael J Glotter et al. A simple carbon cycle representation for economic and policy analyses. Climatic Change, 126(3- 4):319–335, 2014.
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.
Michael J. Glotter, et al. Evaluating the sensitivity of agricultural model performance to different climate inputs. Journal of Applied Meteorology and Climatology, 55(3):579–594, 2016.
W. K. Huang, et al. Estimating changes in temperature extremes from millennial scale climate simulations using generalized extreme value (gev) distributions. 2016.
Johnson, Sean D., and Elisabeth J. Moyer. "Feasibility of US renewable portfolio standards under cost caps and case study for Illinois." Energy Policy 49 (2012): 499-514.
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).
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
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).
Elisabeth J. Moyer et al. "Feasibility and Implications of the Michigan 2012 Proposal 3 for a 25% State Renewable Portfolio Standard." RDCEP Policy Analysis Paper Series No. 12-02, October 2012.
Andrew Poppick, et al. Temperatures in transient climates: improved methods for simulations with evolving temporal covariances. arXiv preprint arXiv:1507.00683, 2015.
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.
Bentley, Chris. Looking out for climate change in Chicago. WBEZ 91.5 Curious City Series, April 2014.
Stefano Castruccio et al. "Statistical Emulation of Climate Model Projections Based on Precomputed GCM Runs*." Journal of Climate 27, no. 5 (2014): 1829-1844.
Won Chang, et al. Changes in spatio- temporal precipitation patterns in changing climate conditions. arXiv preprint arXiv:1601.01147, 2016.
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

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Joshua Elliott

Elliott works on a variety of topics at the interface of global climate change, environmental, and social sciences through an assortment of applied modeling and computational projects. He currently runs several projects designed to improve global change vulnerability, impact, and adaptation (VIA) assessment tools (primarily in agriculture and forestry) using large-scale high-resolution models enabled by high-performance computing.

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Michael Greenstone

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RDCEP co-Principal Investigator

The Milton Friedman Professor in Economics and the College | Director of the Energy Policy Institute at Chicago (EPIC), University of Chicago

Areas of Expertise:

  • Environmental and energy economics
  • Public economics
  • Development economics
  • Labor economics
  • Health economics

Michael Greenstone is the Milton Friedman Professor of Economics and Director of the interdisciplinary Energy Policy Institute at Chicago (EPIC). His other current positions and affiliations include Elected Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Editor of the Journal of Political Economy, Faculty Director of the E2e Project, Head of the JPAL Environment and Energy Program, and co-Director of the International Growth Centre’s Energy Research Programme. Prior to rejoining the faculty at Chicago, Professor Greenstone was the 3M Professor of Environmental Economics at MIT.

Greenstone’s research estimates the costs and benefits of environmental quality and society's energy choices. He has worked extensively on the Clean Air Act and examined its impacts on air quality, manufacturing activity, housing prices, and human health to assess its benefits and costs. He is currently engaged in large-scale projects to estimate the economic costs of climate change and to identify efficient approaches to mitigating these costs.

Greenstone also has extensive policy experience. He served as the Chief Economist for President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers from 2009-10. In addition, he was the Director of the Hamilton Project at the Brookings Institution, which studies a range of policies to promote broad-based economic growth, from 2010-2013 and has since joined its Advisory Council.

Greenstone received a Ph.D. in economics from Princeton University and a BA in economics with High Honors from Swarthmore College.

For more information on Michael Greenstone, please visit: http://www.michaelgreenstone.com/

Amir Jina

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Assistant Professor, Harris School of Public Policy, University of Chicago

 

Amir Jina is an Assistant Professor at University of Chicago’s Harris School of Public Policy, conducting interdisciplinary research on how economic and social development is shaped by the environment. He uses applied economic techniques, climate science, and remote sensing to understand the impacts of climate in both rich and poor countries, and has done fieldwork in India, Bangladesh, Kenya, and Uganda. Amir is a founding member of the Climate Impact Lab, an interdisciplinary collaboration estimating the Social Cost of Carbon with state-of-the-art empirical methods. Prior to University of Chicago, Amir was a visiting scholar at University of California, Berkeley where he worked the Risky Business initiative. Amir received his Ph.D. in Sustainable Development and M.A. in Climate and Society from Columbia University, B.A.s in Mathematics and Theoretical Physics from Trinity College, Dublin, and previously worked with the Red Cross/Red Crescent in South Asia and as a high school teacher in Japan.

Research Interests:

  • Environment and Environmental Change
  • Societal Development

Omobolanle Ajenifuja

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Summer Scholar 2012

Omobolanle Ajenifuja is a rising junior at Lindblom Math and Science Academy.During this school year, she was in a colliquim class where the students worked with Meghan Vincent to answer the question 'Does Chicago spend more money in certian wards than others?". She has continued working to collect the data and she worked with Meghan Vincent collecting and analyzing data. 

"This summer has shown me how research is conducted. It has taught me a lot about energy and possible consqences about what we are doing to the environment. As result of this summer, my interest in field of energy and energy policy has grown.

Sou-Cheng (Terrya) Choi

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Research Scientist

Computation Institute

University of Chicago

Areas of Expertise:

  • Algorithms for large singular linear systems
  • Applied and computational mathematics
  • Industrial-grade software engineering

Choi currently focuses on computational issues and software design for solving scientific problems related to climate change and economic policies. She works on OSCEF, an open-source software framework and toolbox whose core is for formulating and solving large-scale computable general equilibrium (CGE) models, which are widely used in computational economics and climate policy analyses.  

In 2012, Choi was awarded the SIAM Activity Group on Linear Algebra (SIAG/LA) Prize for the paper based on her doctoral dissertation, "MINRES-QLP: A Krylov Subspace Method for Indefinite or Singular Symmetric Systems," SIAM Journal on Scientific Computing, 33:1810-1836, 2011. The prize is awarded every three years by the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) and is considered one of the most prestigious prizes of its kind in the field. In 2007, Choi received Special Congressional Recognition from the U.S. House of Representatives for outstanding public service.

Choi received her PhD in Computational and Mathematical Engineering from the Stanford University. She was a Senior Member of Technical Staff with Oracle before joining the University of Chicago with a joint appointment in the Argonne National Laboratory.  Choi is a member of the SIAM, the Association for Women in Mathematics (AWM), and the Hong Kong Mathematical Society (HKMS).