I started my academic research career in the chemistry lab of Michael Hill at Occidental College studying the catalytic properties of enzymes, but in my second year of undergraduate studies my interests pivoted to economics. Motivated by the issue of climate change, I became interested in how the discipline thought about market failure and externalities after taking a class with Bevin Ashenmiller. After receiving my B.A. in Mathematics and Economics in 2008, I began working as a Research Associate at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, just months before the peak of the Financial Crisis. It was a fascinating time to work for the Federal Reserve System and while there, I collaborated with Jens Christensen to study the impact of the Fed’s quantitative easing policies on market liquidity. The experience allowed me to hone my research skills, but after a few years I was eager to get back to the environmental policy questions that inspired me to pursue economics in the first place.
In 2012, I enrolled in UC Berkeley’s Agricultural and Resource Economics PhD program and a year later I joined the Energy Institute at Haas. During my time at Berkeley, I have completed coursework in Environmental and Resource Economics, Psychology and Economics (aka Behavioral Economics), and Empirical Industrial Organization. I have also provided research assistance to my advisors Meredith Fowlie and Catherine Wolfram on various field experiments evaluating various energy programs. In the last three years, I have taken that experience and translated it into my own research agenda, becoming actively engaged with energy companies located in California such as SolarCity, Tesla, OhmConnect, and Pacific Gas & Electric. In 2016 this outreach resulted in the awarding of a $4 million EPIC grant from the California Energy Commission to OhmConnect to fund a novel field experiment I was central to designing and evaluating.
I have been working as an economist at Amazon Web Services since Fall 2018.
