background
I’m an Assistant Professor in Virginia Tech’s Agricultural and Applied Economics Department. I’m also a faculty affiliate of the VT Remote Sensing Graduate Education Group, the Global Change Center, the Center for Advanced Innovation in Agriculture, as well as the Stanford RegLab.
My research centers on environment, development, and agriculture, with a focus on how advances in remote sensing and machine learning can help equitably enhance environmental compliance in the US and improve programs to manage weather risk around the globe.
Previously, I was a postdoc in the Markets, Risk, and Resilience (MRR) Innovation Lab of the Agricultural and Resource Economics department at the University of California, Davis, following my Ph.D. from the Emmett Interdisciplinary Program in Environment and Resources (E-IPER) at Stanford.
Before grad school, I was a research analyst at Climate Policy Initiative, where I worked on renewable energy finance in the US and tropical land use following my studies of economics and environmental science at UNC-Chapel Hill. I’m also a licensed amateur radio operator (call sign K6NMI).
Join our team!
This year, I am also actively recruiting motivated Postdocs, PhD, MS students, and potential research assistants with interests in risk prediction and management or climate smart agriculture. In addition, I have opportunities for motivated Virginia Tech undergraduates and visiting scholars interested in research.
Prospective PhD students: Please apply to the Virginia Tech AAEC program through the normal channels, and mention my name in your application. Reach out in advance to discuss your fit with the lab and particular fellowships available for incoming VT students.
Current Virginia Tech PhD, MS, and undergraduate students, as well as prospective Postdocs and RAs: Please send me email describing your research interests, your skills/background related to my work, and your CV/resume.
announcements/news
New Story on NASA Harvest Project and Goals
Out-of-this-world technology supports agricultural insurance initiatives with NASA Harvest partnership
Virginia Tech faculty engage in evaluating and improving the design of agricultural insurance programs using satellite data with NASA’s global consortium of researchers and practitioners.
More here: https://news.vt.edu/articles/2024/01/cals_nasa.html
AGU 2023 session on Risk Transfer, Earth Observation, and Forecasts
Oral Session: Wednesday, December 13th from 10:20 am - 11:50 am PST
Poster Session: Thursday, December 14th from 8:30 am - 12:50 pm PST
My colleagues Colby Fisher (Princeton Climate Analytics), Michaela Dolk (World Bank), Iain Willis (Gallagher Re) and I will be hosting an AGU session entitled NH006 - Applications of Science, Practice, and Policy to In(en)sure Sustainable Development Through Risk Transfer”. We received great submissions across a range of hazards, from agricultural droughts, floods, fires, earthquakes and more! Be on the lookout for more details in the months ahead, and hope to see you at AGU this December in San Francisco!
Speakers include:
Emmalina Glinskis, Head of Public Sector Partnerships at Floodbase
Ross Stein, CEO of Temblor, Inc/Stanford
David Saah of Pyregence/University of San Francisco
and many more!
New award: CALS Strategic Plan Advancement Seed Grant
In April 2023, the VT College of Ag and Life Sciences has awarded one year seed grant funding to our interdisciplinary team from Computer Science (Dr. Ed Fox), Virginia Cooperative Extension (Tom Stanley), Geosciences (Dr. Manoochehr Shirzaei), and Agricultural and Applied Economics (me, the PI) to pilot the use of novel remote sensing techniques to issue automatic drought relief payments in the US. Thanks, CALS and team!
New Public Comment Submitted on EPA’s Draft National Enforcement and Compliance Initiatives for Fiscal Years 2024–2027 with Stanford RegLab colleagues
My colleagues of the Stanford RegLab and I have co-signed a public comment on the next round of EPA’s NECI’s, informed by our work over the last years to support efficient and equitable compliance efforts. In short, we encourage broadening the scope of the past NCI focused NPDES compliance by identifying and improving compliance among facilities which have yet failed to obtain a required under the NPDES program — given the scale of this problem, its potential for sizable environmental harms, and the risk of disproportionately impacting over-burdened communities. We also provide some pointers on how they might EPA may tackle this problem.
The request for comments is here: https://www.epa.gov/enforcement/national-enforcement-and-compliance-initiatives and our public comment linked here.
VT Public Interest Technology team selected to advance strategic proposal
I’m delighted to be a part of this team spanning multiple departments and schools at Virginia Tech to focus on building a long term, global research, education, and outreach program on Public Interest Technology at Virginia Tech, where we consider the governance, design, and deployment of technologies, policies, institutions, and organizations that put collective human interests, justice, equity, and accountability at the forefront. Over the next months we’ll be working with DC’s Emergency Management Agency to test out some of our approaches close to home while developing a strategic proposal for Virginia Tech’s growth plans in the years ahead.
A short summary of our project as released in November 2022 is here: https://www.provost.vt.edu/destination_areas/destination-areas-2/vt-pit.html
VT College of Ag and Life Sciences Selected to Receive $80 million to help US farmers adopt climate smart agricultural practices
I’m excited to be part of the team from VT’s College of Ag and Life Sciences working with a variety of organizations across the country to help producers across the country adopt climate smart agricultural practices. In particular, I’ll be helping design the plans to select eligible producers in an equitable way that lends itself towards rigorous evaluation as well as help design the impact evaluation of these funds.
VT Press Release here: https://vtx.vt.edu/articles/2022/09/cals-80millliondollar-grant-for-climate-change.html
AGU 2022 session on "Transferring Risk: Bridging science, practice and policy to in(en)sure sustainable natural peril risk transfer/financing applications" on December 16, 2022
My colleagues Dr. Colby Fisher (Hydronos Labs, a climate analytics company), Michaela Dolk, (currently of the World Bank, formerly of IAG insurance), and I hosted an AGU session entitled “Transferring Risk: Bridging science, practice and policy to in(en)sure sustainable natural peril risk transfer/financing applications” (linked here).
Building on the fruitful conversations that emerged in a similar session we convened from the last two years, we’re keen to focus on the interface of hazard modeling advances and uptake/deployment by risk management organizations. We confiremd Peter Lacovara from Cloud to Street, Dickie Whitaker from the OASIS Loss Modeling Framework/Lighthill Risk Network as two of our invited presenters this year.
Chicago Booth Summer Institute in Machine Learning in Economics from Aug 16-20.
This summer institute will be also livestreaming several talks throughout the week here on youtube, including Susan Athey, Victor Chernozhukov, Jens Ludwig, Josh Blumenstock, and Melissa Dell speaking about a variety of applications of ML to a variety of economic problems. I’ll be participating in both the public and group session — do consider checking it the public lectures!
New publication in ACM FAccT on Machine Learning and Environmental Justice
Applying machine learning to a U.S. Environmental Protection Agency initiative to reduce noncompliance reveals how key design elements determine what communities bear the burden of pollution. Algorithmic design can help ensure fairness and accountability in machine learning used by government regulators. Stanford produced a video summarizing the key points here, which is also linked from this press release. The full paper can be found in the 2021 proceedings from the ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency, linked here.
New publication in Applied Economics Perspectives & Policy
How can emerging digital technologies (e.g., mobile money, digital credit scoring, and earth observation) reshape rural markets for savings, credit and insurance services? The paper (co-authored with Michael Carter of UC Davis) “Can Digital Technologies Reshape Rural Microfinance? Implications for Savings, Credit, & Insurance” is available at this link, and a short twitter thread can be found here.
New publication in Nature Reviews Earth & Environment
Over the last year and half, colleagues from UC Davis, Stanford, and I sought to weave together recent advances in remote sensing and lessons from crop modeling with the recent economics literature on tools to manage weather risk, focused on index insurance. A public version of our paper in Nature Reviews Earth & Environment, entitled “Uniting remote sensing, crop modelling and economics for agricultural risk management,” is available at this link: https://rdcu.be/cdQpO, and a short summary of the paper, ~240 characters at a time, can be found here.
AGU 2020 session on Risk Transfer, Earth Observation, and Forecasts
Virtual Session on Tuesday, 15 December 2020
Oral Session: 19:00 - 20:00 pacific
Poster Session All Day
My colleagues Julio Herrera Estrada (Descartes Labs), Colby Fisher (Princeton Climate Analytics), Michaela Dolk (SwissRe), and I will be hosting a virtual AGU session entitled “Innovations in Risk Transfer Solutions using Earth Observations, Weather Data, Physical Models, and Short to Long Term Forecasts” (link here).
For AGU’s virtual conference this year, we’re aiming to make this session in the style of an interactive panel; Elinor’s session experimented with this format last year for their session on “Advances in remote sensing, machine learning, and economics to improve risk management and evaluate impacts in socio-environmental systems”, and many participants valued the additional engagement among presenters and audience it allowed over the traditional short presentation model.
New Recorded Presentation on ML for Environmental Protection
On July 9, 2020, Dan Ho (Stanford Law Professor and director of the RegLab) and I presented on RegLab's work relating to using ML for Environmental Compliance, focused on water quality, to an audience of over 300 for the E-Enterprise for Environment Webinar Session "Machine Learning and Predictive Analytics in Environmental Protection." A recording of our presentation has been posted at this link. The first thirty minutes feature introductory remarks and Michael Greenstone's (U. Chicago) presentation on predicting violations under RCRA.
New Brief for Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research
Following joint work on Machine Learning for Environmental Monitoring from 2018, I co-authored a new policy brief summarizing innovations in data and behavioral sciences to enhance environmental compliance. You can find the brief at SIEPR's website here. *(brief authored jointly with Dan Ho and Anne McDononough of the Regulation, Evaluation, and Governance Lab.).
Dan and I mentioned this brief in our joint talk on "Machine Learning and Predictive Analytics in Environmental Protection" for the E-Enterprise for Environment Webinar on July 9th, 2020. The brief synthesizes different opportunities to use data-driven risk evaluation to drive environmental compliance. If you're interested in collaborating on trials featuring these techniques, please reach out to the RegLab and/or fill out this form to help us organize the relevant team!