Jonathan Proctor
Congratulations to Jonathan Proctor, who has been awarded the Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation Award by the Agricultural and Applied Economics Association for 2020!
His dissertation, The Value of Light: Crop Response to Optical Scattering and Generalizable Earth Observation, examines the spectral distribution, directionality, and quantity of sunlight in association with human activity, lending insights into agriculture and productivity.
all grown up…
We are very proud that Jon Proctor will finally leave the bay area to do his postdoctoral work at Harvard!
Jon was awarded a fellowship at the Harvard University Center for the Environment and a fellowship at the Harvard Data Science Initiative, so he may never have to leave and get a real job.
Jon Proctor, Solomon Hsiang, and coauthors published a study in Nature estimating the effect of solar radiation management (SRM) on global agricultural production. The paper exploits the historical eruption of massive volcanoes that inject sulfate aerosols into the stratosphere to understand the effect of changing light conditions on crop yields. The paper finds that benefits from cooling, the intended effect of SRM, are fully offset by harm to yields via shading.
Read the study ungated here.
A resource page for the article is here.
Press release here.
Visualization of the stratospheric sulfate aerosols injected into the atmosphere after the eruption of Mt Pinatubo. Each frame is a month. Visualization by Jon Proctor & Solomon Hsiang.
Jonathan Proctor was awarded a grant to use machine learning to study the social consequences of drought by the National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center. Proctor will lead a team of interdisciplinary graduate student collaborators from around the country.
Tamma Carleton and Solomon Hsiang led the first Summer Workshop in Climate Economics, where fifteen doctoral students from around the country learned econometric methods and worked with faculty and postdoc mentors to complete new research projects studying the impacts of climate change around the world.