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Where are you from?

This question gets increasingly interesting as time goes on! I grew up in Chicago, but now, with my move to Colorado, I have lived in every continental US time zone, which is cool!

Tell us about your childhood growing up.

I was a city kid growing up. Lots of taking buses from a young age and now I have maybe a surprising enthusiasm for public transportation. Another consequence of being a city kid is that I did learn how to ski on a landfill (or at least manmade) mountain in Wisconsin.

I read a lot of books, so many books that I would reread the same ones over and over again and see how fast I could do it because I just couldn’t get to bookstores or the library fast enough.

Did you know what you wanted to be when you were growing up?

It fluctuated wildly! I went through the phase that every child, especially those who set foot in the Shedd Aquarium (in Chicago on the shore of Lake Michigan), goes through, which is that I wanted to be a marine biologist, and then, at some point, Vice President, and then at some point a lawyer, mainly because my parents were lawyers. Eventually, I knew I wanted to do something with energy and energy policy, but it was only as I was nailing down grad school applications that it became Environmental Economist. 

What led you to this area of research?

I always have had a deep interest in science, but also in thinking about human decision-making and policy. I took a class in the first quarter of my freshman year in college called Energy Choices for the 21^st Century. It was an overview of all the different technologies and their trade-offs, and I found it super interesting. It made me think about whether I wanted to be a physical scientist or a social scientist in how I could approach these kinds of issues. I spent a summer working in a lab on molecular electronics, on a project that was supposed to be distantly related to solar panels, and after college, I worked at an electricity trading firm, which taught me a lot about electricity infrastructure and how to build models to predict power flow and transmission congestion, and involved more quantitative social science methods.

When I started to look at grad schools I talked to several professors, one of whom told me that going to an econ program would open up more doors for someone at this kind of crossroads of interests. I had a broad area that I was interested in, and economics has given me the toolkit to look at different topics within that area without limiting myself to one single technology or one single methodology, which was really exciting for me.

What would you say to someone considering a similar research path?

People often describe research as an iterative process, where you are identifying an interesting and important question, a methodology that can help you explore it, and existing data or a way of collecting new data to answer the question. In my experience, there is a lot of finding two out of three or finding out that you have to evolve one dimension as you learn about the others: where you have a question and you find that someone has answered it, but maybe not with the best possible methodology, but then the right data doesn’t exist. So, you can end up bouncing between these things in the hope that you can find a true hole in the literature that you can help answer, but also, hopefully, still resembles the thing that made you interested in the first place. I would recommend that folks find a broad area of work that you are really interested in, because you will always end up going down some of these research rabbit holes, and you will hit dead ends, and so making sure that it is something that you are excited about and can be motivated by is super important.

Also finding people who are working on related (or even not that related) projects, with whom you can compare notes and talk broadly about problems, is absolutely necessary for motivation and support.

You have worked as part of a range of interdisciplinary projects, could you say more about what attracts you to work in such teams?

Some important background is that I have always been part of interdisciplinary departments. During my undergraduate I did Earth Systems, my PhD was an economics training in the School of the Environment, where there was a cohort of economists alongside a cohort that included other environmental-focused fields. It has affected every stage of the research that I have been part of. In the idea-generating stage, it’s so helpful to talk to people and hear about the puzzles and problems that they are working on and think about how they connect to things that I am thinking about. As I actually started research projects on energy-related questions that have scientific or engineering aspects to them, I’ve tried to seek out experts in those areas. This helped me identify things that I am just not thinking about, whether this is a flaw in my thinking, or things that need to be added to the model. In the final stage, writing the paper or preparing to present the work, having people from other fields, who are brilliant but not economists, to work with, means that I learn how to better convey what I am doing and why it is important to a broader audience.

What would you like to see as the impacts of your research program in the future?

I chose this subject area because I want to be part of what informs and shapes environmental policy. A lot of my research is looking at the consequences and effectiveness of policies designed to reduce emissions from energy use, and the unexpected interactions between policies. In the US and internationally, there are a lot of really complicated policies, combined with layers of overlapping policies from multiple jurisdictions, which make the effects non-obvious. Overall, rather than having policies economists would describe as the ‘first best’, which are the policies that directly address the underlying distortion and bring about the largest benefits to society, and we instead have policies designed to hopefully get you most of the way there, with the compromises required to get them adopted. The electric vehicle context, where I have done a lot of work, is a good example of this. The incentives are not necessarily how an economist who wanted to reduce emissions from transportation would start out, for a number of reasons, including equity impacts and time horizons. So my work tries to understand the consequences of the policies as implemented, how they could be improved, and at a high level, what the tradeoffs are in designing new policies at the federal, state, or local level. To the extent that I can help policymakers anticipate the weird things that sometimes arise from the way our policies are designed, so that, at the very least, we don’t make things worse, and we don’t give up opportunities to put better policies in place, that would be a great impact.

I am excited at being surrounded by a community of people (at RASEI) who are experts in things that range from the closely related to my previous work, to the wildly unrelated, and I hope to learn a great deal from them.