Welcome! I am an Assistant Professor of Economics at the University of Connecticut. I am a 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. 

In my current work I am designing methods for measuring the risk preferences of agents in the deep past, and exploring the role that learning from personal experiences plays in shaping labor market behavior.

Before graduate school I was an undergraduate at Western Washington University, where I studied mathematics and economics, and dabbled in political science and philosophy. During my bachelor's I published a paper on the relationship between American Constitutional law and international law, and completed an undergraduate thesis on 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.