I am a Political-Geographical Economist. Here is short version of how I came to this, as well as some other miscellaneous details about me.

I was born in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada and moved to the state of Washington for college when I was 18. I discovered economics while I was at Pacific Lutheran University, and I have never looked back. From there I ventured South, to Clemson University, where I studied economics as a graduate student. I then joined the Smith Institute for Political Economy and Philosophy out in Orange California and then the Center for Growth and Opportunity at Utah State University as a research associate. To the right are some pictures of me over these years, alongside some colleagues, mentors, and friends that I've been fortunate enough to meet along the way. (I should have more photos with some great people from my PhD years and who I'm still learning from. If you're reading this then you could be next!) Most recently, I moved to Germany as an Assistant Professor at Leipzig University (for any German readers: Akademischer Assistent, W1 Beamte).

I have many academic inspirations, but Milton Friedman (Greed) holds the proud title of being my favorite Youtube and sparking my initial excursion into economics. My research as a whole is probably most inspired by Thomas Schelling, evident in my specializations on conflict economics and spatial modeling. But I am also motivated by the classics in political economy, which has led me to incorporate politics, geography, and war into my thinking- and I love quote these inspirations liberally. I am also a methodological pluralist, meaning I try to learn from sources as varied as narrative histories to laboratory experiments.

I also have a general fascination with spatial evolution and an almost religious adherence to automating my workflow (hence my github.com/Jadamso account and Linux OS). I've worked or am working on several R packages. The biggest three are STrollR: Space-Time standard errors for big-lattice data (Public), AncientR: Ancient geo-data on violence, politics, and geography (Private Now, Public Soon), SetupGameR: Laboratory experiments with R+Shiny (Private now, Public Soon). In addition to my main research questions, I am generally interested in Archeology, Anthropology, Urbanization, Game Theory, Computing, Geographic Information Systems, Spatial Statistics, Data Visualization, Epistemology, and History of Thought. 

Since graduate school, I've grown to enjoy writing. (Including a little poem below, which I would guess is a sign I've read too much McCloskey if I did not make a haiku about the pigeon-hole principle as an undergraduate.) Over the last several years, I've also enjoyed learning about Leipzig: previously a major European city at the confluence of both the major European East-West and North-South trade routes and aiming for a comeback from DDR times  (locals call it Hypezig). Many things are going on at the university, including some new econometrics classes I've been developing.  Besides the exciting research in the economics department, we are home to some renowned research on human origins and have a fantastic archeological collection.