Katharine R.E. Sims, 2016 Andrew Carnegie Fellow

April 27, 2016
Kate Sims

HEEP Pre-Doctoral Fellow alum Kate Sims has been named among the class of the 2016 Andrew Carnegie Fellows by the Carnegie Corporation of New York. The fellows are selected based on the “originality, promise, and potential impact” of their research proposals, with the expectation that each fellowship will result in “the publication of a book or major study.” Kate’s topic was “Balancing Land Conservation and Development in the Long Term.” In addition to the fellowship, she was also granted tenure as an Associate Professor at Amherst College.

Kate uses microeconomic theory and econometric tools to study how land conservation policies simultaneously affect both environmental and economic outcomes. She has studied multiple policies including protected areas, payments for ecosystem services, and local zoning in Thailand, Mexico, and Massachusetts. She holds a Ph.D. in Political Economy and Government from Harvard University and an undergraduate degree in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology from Princeton University. She has been a fellow of Harvard’s Environmental Economics and Sustainability Science Programs; and her work has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the International Initiative for Impact Evaluation, and the World Bank’s Impact Evaluation to Development Impact program. Her work on conservation and development has been published in both economics journals and high-impact multidisciplinary journals including the American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, The Review of Economics and Statistics, and Conservation Biology. She is passionate about the importance of dialogue between economists and ecologists, and hopes to contribute to conservation policy that protects ecosystems while allowing local economies to flourish. She enjoys integrating her research into teaching, including courses in econometrics, environmental and natural resource economics, and introductory economics with environmental applications.

See also: 2016