Work with thought leaders and academic experts in atmospheric science

Lea-Rachel Kosnik is a Professor of Economics at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. She received her BA and MA from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and her PhD from the University of California, Los Angeles. Her research focuses on renewable energy and climate change, and she is considered a leading expert on the topic of hydroelectric energy generation in the U.S., and hydropower regulation by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. In recent years her research has expanded to include analyses of the academic economics profession itself, including with a focus on gender issues and DEI initiatives. Methodologically, her skill set includes textual analysis and natural language processing, along with traditional econometric techniques. In 2016 she received an honorable mention for article of the year from *Contemporary Economic Policy*, and in 2022 she gave the keynote address to the Illinois Economics Association. Dr. Kosnik is perhaps best known (in a service capacity) as the Association of Environmental and Resource Economist’s (AERE’s) Midwest representative, annually organizing the full track of AERE-sponsored environmental sessions at the Midwest Economic Association meetings. Dr. Kosnik has also served as President, Past-President, and Board Member of the Transportation and Public Utilities Group (TPUG), and as a Department Chair.

I am a bioinformatician and researcher in computational biology. My research focuses on the application of machine learning and data analysis to understand the molecular basis of disease. I also work on developing novel software tools for data management and analysis.

Professor Ramirez is a native of Chile and a naturalized U.S. citizen since 1990. He received his Ph.D. in economics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1984 and has been at Trinity College since 1985. He has held visiting positions at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana (Summer 1991 and 1992), Haverford College (Spring 1992), Vanderbilt University (Spring 1999), and Yale University (Spring 2006). His teaching interests are primarily in the areas of Latin American economic development and international finance and open economy macroeconomics. At the College he usually offers Latin American economic development and Structural Reform in Latin America during the fall term, while international finance and open economy macroeconomics is taught during the spring term. He also teaches a course in Time-Series Analysis every other spring term, with particular emphasis on unit root and cointegration analysis, error correction modeling, and forecasting. Insofar as his research is concerned, it is primarily dedicated to analyzing the challenges and opportunities that Latin American nations face as they attempt to stabilize and reform their economies in an increasingly globalized world. In particular, his work has reviewed and analyzed the impact of IMF-sponsored adjustment and stabilization measures in Argentina, Chile, and Mexico, as well as the mixed success of structural reform programs such as privatization of state-owned firms, deregulation of economic activity, and liberalization of trade and finance. His research has also focused on the economic and institutional determinants of foreign direct investment in Argentina, Chile, and Mexico, as well as the impact of these flows on private capital formation and labor productivity growth in Latin America. Another important focus of his work in recent years has been the growing role of remittance flows in financing private investment spending and boosting economic growth in countries such as Ecuador, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Jamaica, and Mexico. Finally, he has published work in the history of economic thought relating to Marx's important analysis of wages and cyclical crises, his theory of absolute and differential ground rent, his analysis of the falling rate of profit, Marx's controversial writings on the so-called Asiatic mode of production, and his conception of capital as a social process.

Dr. Peter Reich, a renowned expert in forest ecology and climate change science, is the Director of the Institute for Global Change Biology (IGCB) at the University of Michigan. Reich, who has conducted global change research on plants, soils, and ecosystems across a range of scales, will maintain a joint affiliation at the University of Minnesota, where he is a Regents Professor. Previously, Reich was the Chief Scientist at the Hawkesbury Institute for the Environment at Western Sydney University in Australia from 2011 to 2021. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a fellow of the Ecological Society of America, and a BBVA Prize Laureate (BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Ecology and Conservation Biology). He also helped launch the science education channel, MinuteEarth, which has more than 400 million views on YouTube and other platforms. According to Research.com, Reich is the #1 scientist in the world in the field of ecology and evolution.