Welcome! I am an Assistant Professor of Economics at the University of Connecticut. I am an Behavioral Economist whose research agenda is focused on understanding the Co-Evolution of Risk and Utility, theoretically and empirically. My research draws on and contributes to a variety of subfields in economics that are concerned with decision-making under uncertainty, most notably the economics of insurance, financial economics, economic history, macroeconomics, agricultural economics, development economics, and the economics of climate change. At UConn I teach Behavioral Economics and Microeconomic Theory. I also co-organize our Microeconomics seminar, and am a faculty affiliate of the UConn Cognitive Science Program.

I received my PhD in Economics from the University of California San Diego in 2020. My primary training in graduate school was as a Behavioral Economist and Decision Theorist specializing in Risk and Uncertainty. In my dissertation, Adaptive Risk-Taking, I studied the ways in which individuals' risk preferences are affected by lifetime experiences of aggregate shocks like macroeconomic fluctuations and climate change, using large-scale panel survey data from Indonesia and Mexico. During this time I co-authored the current frontier study on the genetics of risk preferences. When the pandemic hit I also worked on understanding the role that stay-at-home orders played in shaping Covid-19 disease dynamics.

Before graduate school I was an undergraduate at Western Washington University. During my bachelor's I dabbled in Environmental Policy and Philosophy, and published a paper on the co-evolution of American Constitutional law and international law. I graduated in 2013 with two degrees, Summa Cum Laude: a BA in Economics and a BS in Mathematics. I was selected as the top graduate from both departments that year, and also received a distinction from the mathematics faculty for my undergraduate thesis, in which I explored the fundamentals of fractal geometry. In the decade before becoming an economist, I also had an active career in applied risk-taking as a long-distance backpacker and Thru-Hiker.