The Co-evolution of Commodity Flows, Economic Geography, and Emissions / Advances in Spatial Science (PDF)

Adjunct Professor at Columbia University and a member of the Critical Transportation Infrastructure Protection Committee, National Research Council of the U.S.

Ziye Zhang is a Postdoctoral Research Asociate at the Paul and Marcia Wythes Center on Contemporary China. He holds a PhD in Regional Science from Cornell University. He is interested in urban and regional economics, applied econometrics, and spatial analysis. His current studies focus on consumer behavior in housing markets and incorporate recent micro-behavioral insights into housing choice to improve the understanding of market mechanisms and outcomes. His work also involves methodological developments in regional science and applied econometrics. Before coming to Cornell, Ziye received his master's degree in Regional Economics and bachelor's degree in Public Policy from Peking University in China.



Benjamin Brown-Steiner is a Scientist at Atmospheric and Environmental Research (AER), and has nearly 10 years of experience in the atmospheric sciences. His research interests include atmospheric chemistry, emissions, meteorology, and climatology with a focus on uncertainty quantification, model complexity, and the impact of variability. At Cornell University he studied the influence of Asian emissions on air quality within the United States and uncertainties associated with the selection of model parameters. He also worked with an interdisciplinary team of scientists and economists to develop a Black Carbon emissions inventory for trucks and trains. As MIT, he studied the variability of surface ozone and the uncertainties associated with identifying signals based on the selection of spatial and temporal scales. He also compared chemical mechanisms of different complexities and developed strategies for using simplified chemical mechanisms. At AER, he is working on emissions inventory development and supports a variety of projects, including testing and updating chemical mechanisms and studying the impact of biomass burning on US air quality.