I am an Assistant Professor of Economics and William H. Hurt Scholar at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). I am also a Faculty Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), University Fellow at Resources for the Future and an affiliate of Caltech’s Linde Center for Science, Society, and Policy.

My research aims to provide empirically based estimates for the environmental benefits and economic costs associated with natural resource protection. For example, I have work quantifying the flood mitigation value of natural lands, developing new approaches for accounting for ecosystem services in climate policy, and identifying cost-effective climate adaptation solutions.

I also have a strong interest in developing novel data and methods to enable progress on historically intractable problems in these areas of research. For example, I developed the spatial first differences research design in collaboration with Solomon Hsiang to identify causal effects in cross-sectional data. In ongoing work, I am applying machine learning to vast archives of historical aerial photography to better measure and understand long-run relationships between environmental change and human development.

I received my PhD in Agricultural and Resource Economics in 2021 from UC Berkeley, where I was doctoral fellow at the Global Policy Lab and a NSF Graduate Research Fellow.