Lab Members

Ayushi is a MS Data Science Student at University of Rochester. She is interested in applying Data Science techniques to solve social problems in domains like healthcare, climate change, etc.

Khadijah Bland is a second-year PhD student at University of Rochester in the Health Services Research and Policy program. Her research interests include maternal health, hospital utilization patterns, and health outcomes.

Andy Boslett completed his PhD in environmental and natural resource economics at the University of Rhode Island in 2016. He is now a research associate at the University of Rochester in Elaine Hill's lab and an economist/data scientist at the Rochester Data Science Consortium. His fields of interest are applied microeconomics, energy economics, environmental economics, and health economics.

Mira Chaskes is currently an undergraduate at the University of Rochester studying Mathematics and Economics. Her research interests include information asymmetries and the impact of policy on healthcare outcomes.

Avery Girsky is currently an undergraduate at the University of Rochester double majoring in Data Science and Mathematics. His research interests revolve around the idea of using data science for social good.

Lena Harris is a second-year PhD student at University of Rochester in Economics, with focus on applied microeconomics. Her research interests are environmental economics, gender, and political conflict.

Isaac Li is currently an undergraduate at the University of Rochester studying Economics, Mathematics, and Computer Science. His research interests include applied microeconomics and the implementation of data analysis through computer science.

Yuchen Li is currently an undergraduate at the University of Rochester double majoring in Data Science and Financial Economics. Her research interests include applying data analysis techniques, such as machine learning, to economics and health related topics.

Klint Mane is a fifth-year PhD student at University of Rochester studying economics. His research focuses on applied microeconomics, specifically labor and technology. He is interested in applying his causal inference toolkit to tackle real-life challenges.

Pramod Manohar is currently an undergraduate at the University of Rochester pursuing a double major in Economics and Mathematics. His research interests include economic development as well as the effects of climate change.

Esha Mardikar is currently an undergraduate at the University of Rochester and is pursuing a double major in Economics and Philosophy with a minor in Statistics.

Victor Hernandez Martinez is a PhD candidate in Economics at the University of Rochester. Victor earned her MS in Economics and Public Policy from the Barcelona Graduate School of Economics in 2015. Victor’s work has focused on understanding the reasons driving the heterogeneity in earning losses following a displacement event, specifically related to the concept of human capital specificity. Additionally, Victor studied the complementarity of different types of labor inputs exploiting the exogenous variation generated in the labor markets by the fracking boom in the US. For Dr. Hill’s team Victor’s role has been to provide support with data analysis and the econometrics of empirical strategies commonly used in experimental environments, specifically regarding the fracking boom of the last decade, the use of consumption data from Nielsen and the use of spatial data to understand the distribution of water supplies in different regions.

Qiuyuan (Crystal) Qin is a second-year PhD student at University of Rochester in the Health Service Research department. Her research interests include COVID-related analysis, health economics, health outcomes, statistical methods and machine learning.

Helena Rajalingam is currently an undergraduate at the University of Rochester studying Computational Biology and is a Rochester Early Medical Scholar. Her research interests include maternal health and morbidity and she is specifically interested in understanding social determinists of health on pregnancy outcomes and COVID. 

Alan Rojas is currently an undergraduate at the University of Rochester studying Environmental Studies and Economics. His research interests include the health and economical impact of environmental pollution by fossil fuels, maternal health, and other pollution related topics. 

Ethan Sawyer is currently an undergraduate at the University of Rochester studying Economics. His research interests include applied economics. He is specifically interested in the impact of gangs and crime on education and the effect of job loss on opioid uptake.

Evan Volkin is currently an undergraduate at the University of Rochester pursuing a dual-degree in Economics and Business Analytics. In Dr. Hill’s team, Evan’s role is centered around data cleaning and analysis using tools such as R, STATA, Python, SAS, and ArcGIS. He also assists Dr. Hill in lab management and provides writing support. His research interests include health and environmental outcomes and how they intersect with policies, neighborhood change, and labor & housing markets.

Catherine Xie is an undergraduate at the University of Rochester studying Statistics and Biochemistry. Her research interests include using statistical analysis to tackle public health topics, such as long-COVID and tobacco use.

Zhushan Xie is an undergraduate at the University of Rochester, pursuing a double degree in Data Science and Business Finance. She is interested in applying Data Science techniques to solving real-life problems. Her research interests are the environmental and economic impacts related to air quality.

Karla Zendejas is currently an undergraduate at the University of Rochester majoring in Economics with a minor in the Environmental Humanities. Her research interests include environmental economics, environmental justice, and healthcare policy.

External Lab Members

Richard W DiSalvo is a Post-Doctoral Research Associate at Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. Dr. DiSalvo studies applied microeconomics with a focus on public policy. His current policy interests are in drinking water policy, oil and gas development, and K-12 education. As part of Dr. Hill's team, he is working on the environmental economics of domestic drilling and the link between drinking water contamination and health. He also supports the team by instructing undergraduate research assistants in data analysis. Dr. DiSalvo received his Ph.D in Economics from University of Rochester in 2019. Learn more about Richard's work.

Naima Farah is a Post-Doctoral Research Economist at Texas A&M University’s AgriLife Research Center and an Adjunct Assistant Professor at State University of New York (SUNY) at New Paltz. Dr. Farah’s primary research fields are energy, natural resource, and environmental economics. She has published work on endangered species, open access renewable resource extraction, and on water quality control. Her current work focuses on externalities related to unconventional oil and gas production (hydraulic fracturing) and food-energy-water nexus. She has been working with Dr. Hill and her research team on the effects of power plants on local housing market in the age of decreased coal use and increased natural gas use by the power plants. Dr. Farah received her Ph.D in Economics from University of Calgary in 2017.

Max Harleman is an Assistant Professor of Public Administration at Georgia College and State University. His research focuses on the governance of energy and industrial infrastructure projects, and how they impact the well-being of nearby communities. His previous and ongoing projects have explored how abandoned oil and gas wells affect real estate investment, how natural gas tax revenues affect local public finances, and how the construction of high-voltage lines to expand renewable transmission affects neighboring property values. Dr. Harleman holds a PhD in Public and International Affairs and a Master of Public Administration from the University of Pittsburgh. He is a Returned Peace Corps Volunteer, serving as an institutional development volunteer in Grenada between 2013 and 2015.

Lala Ma is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Economics in the Gatton College of Business and Economics at the University of Kentucky. Dr. Ma’s primary research field is environmental economics with a focus on non-market valuation. Her work deals with estimating the values placed on improving environmental quality using a combination of reduced-form and structural methods. Specifically, she has worked on projects to recover the value of brownfield remediation, of flood risk changes, and, more recently in collaboration with Dr. Hill, of mitigating the health and environmental costs of shale gas development. Dr. Ma received her Ph.D. in Economics from Duke University in 2014.​

Mary Willis is a PhD candidate in Environmental and Occupation Health in the College of Public Health and Human Sciences at Oregon State University. Mary earned her MPH in Epidemiology from the University of Rochester in 2016, where Dr. Hill supervised her thesis on shale gas development and pediatric asthma. Mary’s dissertation research examines the perinatal health impacts of in utero exposure to emissions from the energy sector (e.g. shale gas development, power plants, vehicle traffic) using spatial exposure assessment and causal inference methods. She was recently awarded an F31 National Research Service Award from the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences to pursue this work. Learn more about Mary’s work.