About

I am a doctoral student at the University of Oxford’s Environmental Change Institute, an affiliate of the Institute of New Economic Thinking and the Centre for the Study of African Economies, and a member of St Edmund Hall. Previously, I was a research assistant in Climate Compatible Growth at the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment. Before coming to Oxford, I worked with the Development Economics Group at ETH Zurich and studied at UNU-MERIT and Maastricht University. You can view my CV here.

My research interests lie at the intersection of environmental and development economics, or envirodevonomics for short. This means I study how development and environmental sustainability can reinforce each other in low- and middle-income country settings. In my dissertation, I use applied microeconomics to explore the role of agricultural technologies in sustainable development.

I think a lot about how well agricultural technologies can scale in the varying contexts of African smallholder agriculture, and why some farmers utilise improved seeds, fertilisers, irrigation equipment, and other technologies while others do not. As such, my research aims to help

• find out which technologies actually work at scale in varying smallholder farming contexts,
• identify (economic, social, cultural, political) barriers and enabling factors for their adoption,
• understand how farmers' decisions respond to agroclimatic and conflict-related production shocks, and
• characterise what sustainable and equitable long-term trajectories could look like, considering climate change, demographics and shifts in consumption patterns.

My DPhil¹ forms part of the ECI’s new programme on climate resilience in African food systems. I frequently travel between the UK and our focus countries – Ethiopia, Kenya, Nigeria, and Rwanda – to meet and learn from the many brilliant people we work with across farmer organisations, businesses, government and NGOs. The programme is led by Dr Agnes M. Kalibata and my doctoral supervisor is Professor Michael Obersteiner

Curiosity, caffeine, and conversation fuel most everything I do. One of my favourite platforms to provide all three of them is the Environmental Economics Seminar Series which I help organise. It also provides a welcome contrast to the rest of my work time, which is largely spent coding in R and writing up findings in Markdown. Sometimes, I write a blog post to take note of something I might otherwise forget. In my screen-free time, you might find me running around outside, learning a new language², or taking pictures on my late granpa’s analogue camera from the 1960s.³

If any of the above resonates with you, say hi!