Gabriela Perez-Quesada, Ph.D.

I am a an Assistant Professor in the Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. My research focuses on the interactions between agricultural production, natural resources, and the environment. I am particularly interested in better understanding how water scarcity and climate change impact agricultural production, and how economic agents and institutions of the agricultural sector adapt to them. I am also interested in the role of policy mechanisms in agricultural producer decision making, and the implementation of behavioral interventions and collective action efforts to conserve natural resources. 

Prior to joining the University of Tennessee, I was a Postdoctoral Scholar at the University of California Davis and the USDA California Climate Hub. In this role, I used economic modeling techniques to characterize water use impacts and relative efficiency of differing water scarcity adaptation strategies in the Western US.

I received my doctorate in Agricultural Economics from Kansas State University. My dissertation research was focused on quantifying how depletion of groundwater stocks reduces the flow of economic value and the production of goods from the resource in the context of the High Plains Aquifer in the central US. My dissertation also provides new insights on the potential of collective efforts by irrigators to manage the resource. As graduate student, I was a trainee in the Rural Resource Resiliency Traineeship Program funded by the National Science Foundation to conduct interdisciplinary research to solve the challenges of creating sustainable food, energy, and water systems in semi-arid regions such as Kansas.