Biography

Ben is an economist and decision support modeler with a joint affiliation between Water in the West and the Natural Capital Project (NatCap). At Water in the West, his focus is on assessing and improving the ability of science and economics to support the deployment of innovative financial mechanisms for watershed health. At NatCap, his current work involves incorporating agricultural and livelihood considerations into landscape optimization, and developing and demonstrating tools and guidance to improve the treatment of uncertainty in ecosystem service modeling. He has broader research interests in decision-making under deep uncertainty, social choice processes, and sustainability issues at the intersection of environment and development. Ben earned a PhD in Policy Analysis from the Pardee RAND Graduate School at the RAND Corporation where he completed a dissertation modeling efficiency and equity tradeoffs in groundwater markets. He also holds a BS in mathematics from Harvey Mudd College, with significant coursework in engineering as well as political and ethical philosophy. Immediately prior to joining the Woods Institute for the Environment at Stanford, he was a country economist conducting cost-benefit analyses for the Millennium Challenge Corporation, a US government international development agency.