MPP Candidate, Harris School of Public Policy, University of Chicago
Katrina Lewis is an M.P.P candidate at the University of Chicago's Harris School of Public Policy. Her main area of interest is energy economics and policy. Katrina holds a B.A. in Organizational Studies and French from the University of Michigan and a certificate of political studies from the Institut d'études politiques.
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:
Research Projects:
Soil Moisture | Climate Variability: statistics and observation based simulations | Shadowing | Climate variability: effect of model spatial resolution
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.
Researcher, RDCEP
AAAS Fellow, Office of US Senator Al Franken
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.
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.
Computational Climate Scientist, Mathematics and Computer Science Division, Argonne National Laboratory Fellow, Computation Institute, University of Chicago
Areas of Expertise:
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.
Model fidelity | Climate Emulation | Precipitation Physics in Climate Models
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.
Atmospheric Scientist and Manager, Climate Research Section, Environmental Science Division
Argonne National Laboratory
Areas of Expertise:
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).
Assistant Professor, School of Cinematic Arts, DePaul University
Computation Institute
Areas of Expertise:
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.
Assistant Professor, University of Naples Parthenope
Argonne National Laboratory
Areas of Expertise:
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.
Co-PI, RDCEP 1 (2010-2015)
Scientist, Mathematics and Computer Science Division, Argonne National Laboratory
Fellow, Computation Institute, University of Chicago
Areas of Expertise:
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.
CIM-EARTH | MagPIE
Assistant Professor, Department of Statistics, Carleton College
Poppick’s research pertains to climate variability, changes thereof, and simulating transient climates, with a focus on statistical methods for non-stationary processes. He received a PhD in the Department of Statistics at the University of Chicago, from which he also received a BA in statistics.
Louis Block Professor, Department of the Geophysical Sciences
University of Chicago
Areas of Expertise:
Pierrehumbert studies the physics of climate, especially regarding the long-term evolution of the climates of Earth and Mars. Previously, he directed the Climate Systems Center, which was established with a $3.6 million grant from the National Science Foundation to develop software for rapidly conducting advanced climate simulations. Pierrehumbert was an author of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's Third Assessment Report (1997-2001). He also was a member of the National Research Council's Panel on Abrupt Climate Change and its Societal Impacts (2000-2001), and currently serves on the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Panel on abrupt change. Pierrehumbert was a John Simon Guggenheim Fellow in 1996-1997.
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:
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
Robustness in Economic Models with Climate Change | Model uncertainty and energy technology
Professor of Statistics, London School of Economics
Visiting Professor, Department of Statistics, University of Chicago
Areas of Expertise:
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.
Model Evaluation and Fidelity | Shadowing
Hailiang Du | Ana Lopez
Funded under NSF Decision Making Under Uncertainty Program. Award No. SBE-1463644
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