Teaching

Richard Evans Teaching Statement

I have been teaching economics and computational economics at the university level for more than 10 years. My teaching philosophy focuses on macroeconomic policy, computational economics, computational methods, open source programming and collaborative workflow. I have a long record of building students' skills by advising masters theses, hiring research assistants, and coauthoring papers with the students whose contributions are the greatest. I make my teaching lead directly into my research by covering topics and assigning problem sets that are exemplified by current real world applications and projects. I also use my courses as a natural pathway for students to become research assistants. Seeing students transition from the classroom to successful applied research is one of the most gratifying characteristics of my job.

The table below summarizes specific topics I cover in my courses, divided into broad subject categories. My teaching portfolio includes the following broad areas:

• • Graduate undergraduate macroeconomics, international economics, computational economics, data science, machine learning, and mathematics of optimization courses.

  • Development and lead instruction in core computational social science graduate curriculum.

  • Innovative mentored learning laboratory and intensive boot camp.

  • Development of open source, open access research and learning platforms.

  • Training policymakers in the United States, European Commission, and Indian Ministry of Finance how to build large-scale macroeconomic models of fiscal policy.

  • Draft of a textbook with Jason DeBacker, Overlapping Generations Models for Policy Analysis: Theory and Computation (currently 22 chapters)

Since July 2016, I have been a Senior Lecturer in the M.A. Program in Computational Social Science (MACSS) at the University of Chicago. I was hired at the University of Chicago just before the inaugural year of the MACSS program. I have had a central role in the development and teaching of its core curriculum. And I was the advisor for five MA theses in the 2017-2018 academic year.

In my first year at the University of Chicago, John Diamond (Rice University) and I received a five-year $5.4 million grant from the Charles Koch Foundation to run the Open Source Macroeconomics Laboratory (OSM Lab) at Chicago and the Dynamic Analysis Center at Rice University. The OSM Lab is an innovative, intensive, and immersive training experience followed by a mentored research experience that focuses on computational economics directed primarily at advanced undergraduate students. The OSM Lab is a continuation and progression of a project that I ran while at Brigham Young University from 2012 to 2016. Students who have participated in this program have been admitted to the top PhD programs in the country.

Categorization of specific topics in teaching portfolio by subject category