about
who are you?
I'm an economist by training. I like bike rides, snowboarding, cats, making generative art, and reading speculative fiction. I'm mostly water.
From late 2023 through early 2025 I served as a senior economist, including as acting Chief Economist, at NASA. Before that I was an Assistant Professor of Economics at Middlebury College.
At NASA, I led agency-level market analysis in areas of strategic interest. These included private space stations, cislunar transportation and infrastructure, and space data relay. I also led work on cost-benefit analysis of space sustainability investments.
Most of my academic research is on the resource and industrial economics of outer space and the macroeconomics of environmental phenomena.
some of my academic work
On outer space: measuring the gains from optimal orbital-use management through Pigouvian taxation; developing resource economic theory for open-access vs optimal orbit use and assessing conditions under which Kessler Syndrome is an equilibrium or even optimal outcome; studying economic policy choice and the equilibrium deployment of active debris removal technologies; studying how megaconstellation operators will interact and how they should be regulated; designing integrated assessment models of orbit use; using network theory and econometrics to develop granular models of risk-mitigating maneuvering patterns in orbit; assessing the terrestrial sustainability impacts of megaconstellations; and analyzing the structure of self-enforcing international agreements to manage collision risk and debris production. These projects involve a mix of economic theory and statistics. Calibrating/estimating the models tends to require substantial new data collection and integration.
On environmental phenomena: modeling disease-economy trade-offs under different control strategies; estimating the dynamic effects of fires on county-level employment in the US.