Yuta J. Masuda

I am the Director of Science at the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation, where I lead the environment portfolio that seeks to advance conservation, climate change, and sustainable development goals.

Previously, I was a Senior Human Dimensions and Behavioral Scientist in The Nature Conservancy's Global Science Division for nine years, focusing on various aspects of conservation social science. My current research agenda focuses on how conservation and sustainability policies impact human well-being, investigating the causal impacts of human behavior and institutions on conservation and human well-being outcomes, and understanding how environmental change impacts people and nature. Some of my recent work examines the biodiversity and human well-being co-benefits of natural climate solutions using natural language processing and large language models,  the impacts of extreme events exacerbated by climate change impact low- and middle-income populations, the barriers to sustainable agroforestry among farmers in low- and middle-income countries, as well as estimating the human health impacts from ecological forest practices in the Western US. 

My research primarily employs economic models and methods, although I integrate and utilize theories and methods from across the social sciences. In many projects, I lead multidisciplinary teams of social, physical, natural, and public health scientists and engineers to investigate both field-based empirical and theoretical questions that are often transdisciplinary. In all my projects, I pay particular attention to scale, context, distributional effects of policies and shocks, as well as the external validity of research and methods to other places and cultures across time. An explicit focus across all of my research is making sure that there are links to policy. This might be, for example, by involving decision-makers or other stakeholders throughout the research process, by creating concrete outputs that speak to both academic and non-academic audiences, and by developing research projects that target specific policy initiatives. My work has been published in outlets such as Nature Sustainability, Nature Communications, Global Environmental Change, Lancet Planetary Health, Environmental Research Letters, Conservation Biology, Conservation Letters, Land Use Policy, Bioscience, One Earth, and Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment. Prior to being a researcher, I served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in the Republic of Georgia and worked at RTI International as a Health Economics Research Assistant.