People

Meet the people behind the HEAL project.

Ulrich J. Wagner

Ulrich J. Wagner is the Principal Investigator of HEAL. His research interests are in environmental economics, industrial organization and public economics. His research has been published in leading peer-reviewed academic journals, and won him the 2015 Erik Kempe Award in Environmental and Resource Economics. Ulrich is a co-editor of the Journal of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists. Ulrich Wagner received his Ph.D. in Economics from Yale University and subsequently worked as a postdoctoral research fellow at the Earth Institute at Columbia University. Before joining the University of Mannheim, he worked as an Associate Professor of Economics at Universidad Carlos III in Madrid.

For more information, visit his website.

Yixuan Gu

Yixuan is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Economics, University of Mannheim, in collaboration with College of Engineering and Applied Science, University of Colorado Boulder. Her research focuses on atmospheric environment, air quality and air pollution, chemistry-climate interactions, as well as the causal impacts of air pollution on human health using the chemical transport model. She has published in several peer-reviewed journals and received the Outstanding Youth Award by the Shanghai Metereological Service (SMS). She is working on HEAL to integrate econometric analysis with the GEOS-Chem adjoint model.
Yixuan contributes to Part I and II of HEAL.
Find out more about her here.

Laure de Preux

Laure is an Assistant Professor of Economics at Imperial College Business School, and affiliated to the Centre for Health Economics & Policy Innovation.
Laure’s research interests lie in environmental and health economics. She works on climate change policies’ evaluation, the impact of health insurance on lifestyles, and the determinants of health with a particular focus on the effect of climate and pollution on individual’s behaviour and healthcare utilisation.
Laure contributes to Part I of HEAL.
Find out more about her here.

Felix Holub

Felix Holub is a Post Doctoral Researcher in Economics at the Goethe University in Frankfurt. His research interests lie in applied microeconomics, especially focusing on labor, environmental and health economics and the overlap of these fields.
He obtained his PhD at the University of Mannheim and has been working closely with Prof. Wagner.
Felix contributes to Part II of HEAL.
Find out more about him here.

Laura Hospido

Laura Hospido is the Unit Head of the Microeconomic Analysis Unit, within the Structural Analysis and Microeconomic Studies Department, at the DG Economics, Statistics and Research of the Banco de España. Her research interests include earnings dynamics and wage inequality, labour supply and labour mobility, gender economics, and financial competences. Her research has been published in the Review of Economics and Statistics, Economic Journal, Journal of Applied Econometrics, Labour Economics, and Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics, among others.
Laura contributes to Part II of HEAL.
Find out more about her here.

Daven Henze

Dr. Daven Henze is a Professor and the S. P. Chip and Lori Johnson Faculty Fellow in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Colorado Boulder, and an Adjunct Senior Research Scientist at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University. He holds a Ph.D. in chemical engineering from Caltech.
Dr. Henze’s research focuses on air quality, long-range pollution transport, and climate change. Dr. Henze has received an EPA Early Career award, a NASA New Investigator award, and several university awards for teaching and research.
Daven contributes to Part I of HEAL.
Find out more about him here.

Dana Kassem

Dana Kassem is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Economics, University of Mannheim. Her research is at the intersection of Energy and Environmental Economics and Development Economics, with special focus on how resources can drive growth and the externalities this growth creates. She obtained her Ph.D. in Economics from the London School of Economics (LSE, Great Britain), as well as an M.Sc. in Economics from the LSE and a BA from the American University of Beirut (Lebanon).
Dana contributes to Part I of HEAL.
Find out more about her here.

Brant Walker

Brant Walker is a former Fulbright Research Scholar at Universität Mannheim, and current Pre-Doctoral Research Fellow jointly appointed at Stanford University’s Program on Energy and Sustainable Development and the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research.
His work focuses on evaluating climate change policies, the impact of our environment on human health, and the design of water and electricity markets in the face of uncertainty, stressed resources, and environmental goals.
You can reach him at brantw [at] stanford [dot] edu.