Meet the Lab!
Andrew Hultgren
Assistant Professor
You've met me already. See the landing page for my info.
Students
Hannah Kim (on 2026 job market!)
Hannah is a PhD student in the Department of Agricultural and Consumer Economics at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Her research lies at the intersection of environmental and development economics, with a particular focus on how climate risk shapes household welfare and adaptation in vulnerable regions. She uses micro-level survey data, gridded weather data, and applied microeconomic methods to study these questions in developing countries. Hannah holds an M.S. in Applied Economics from the Dyson School at Cornell University. Hannah is on the academic job market in Fall 2026.
Melissa Carson
Melissa is a PhD student of Applied Economics at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, specializing in environmental economics and data science. Before graduate school, Melissa supported economic damage calculation and testimony in large-scale civil litigation, such as Oregon v. Monsanto. Her research focuses on heterogeneous distributional outcomes of environmental laws and policies, while seeking to understand their causal mechanisms. She is currently working on interdisciplinary research to causally estimate the link between mortality, power outages, and weather extremes. Please reach out to Melissa for questions or just to connect at: mc127@illinois.edu
Alumni
Gowthami Venkateswaran, PhD
Gowthami is an applied economist at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Her research focus is on using observational data to estimate causal relationships in development and environmental economics, focusing on questions relating to food security, agricultural supply chains and the impact of distortionary agricultural subsidies on the environment and human health. After graduating in 2025, she joined Keystone Strategies as a Consultant.
Cheng Bi, PhD
Cheng is a Ph.D. candidate in Agricultural and Applied Economics at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. His research focuses on climate change, green technology, and sustainable agriculture, with projects spanning bioeconomic modeling, supply chain and market structure analysis, and the quantification of extreme events. He employs a wide range of empirical tools, including dynamic programming, machine learning, and causal inference methods, to address real-world policy questions in agriculture, environment, and natural resources.
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