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Climate change and its multiple consequences are among the most important challenges humanity needs to solve in the 21st century. Global warming and the reduction of biodiversity will impact our lives by creating extreme weather conditions, migration within and across countries, a lack of access to water, etc. To solve these issues, societies may need to rethink their relationship to the environment and restructure their economies. What is the current state of climate change, and how may it impact our lives in the next generations? What can governments, firms, and individuals do to reduce climate change and its broad impact?
This summer program will discuss these questions and provide a general overview of the latest research and policy initiatives in the areas of climate change and sustainability. Students will participate in an immersive academic experience that will introduce them to Duke Kunshan University’s interdisciplinary and innovative education. Students will participate in interactive lectures, discussions, online experiments, debates, and other innovative experiential learning activities. They will have the opportunity to develop their research, writing, and presentation skills via working on a policy research project guided by DKU professors.
Dr. Jingbo Cui is a tenured Associate Professor of Applied Economics at the Division of Social Sciences, Co-Director at the Environmental Research Center, and Director of Graduate Studies for the International Master of Environmental Policy (iMEP) program at Duke Kunshan University, Adjunct Professor and Ph.D. Supervisor at the School of Economics and Management at Wuhan University. Dr. Cui’s research centers on Environmental Economics, the Economics of Innovation, and the Economics of Climate Change. His recent research has delved into intriguing topics such as the drivers and obstacles to low-carbon innovation, the economic and environmental impacts of China’s climate policy and risk. His scholarly contributions have been published in top-tier academic journals, including Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), American Economic Review Papers and Proceedings, Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, American Journal of Agricultural Economics, Environmental and Resource Economics, Journal of Regional Science, The World Economy, and Energy Economics. He has served as a referee for leading journals in Environmental Economics, Agricultural Economics, and Economics of Innovation (i.e., JEEM, AJAE, JAERE, Nature Climate Change, and Research Policy), as Associate Editor for the Environment and Development Economics, and a member of the editorial council in JAERE. His research projects have been funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (General Program, Junior Program, and Urgent Program) and the Jiangsu Qinglan Project.
His research focuses on experimental and behavioral economics, social network analysis, labor economics, applied microeconomics, and agent-based modelling. He has done research on diverse topics including the impact of social networks on job finding and labor market outcomes, the competition for social status in networks, discrimination in the labor market, entrepreneurship among ethnic minorities, whistleblowing in organizations, bank runs, and the evolution of cooperation. His has articles have appeared in academic journals including the European Economic Review, Economic Journal, Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, Scandinavian Journal of Economics, Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics, Economics Letters, Journal of Theoretical Biology, B.E. Journal of Theoretical Economics, and PLOS ONE. His research has been supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China. Horváth has a B.A. in economics from Corvinus University, Hungary, and an M.A. and Ph.D. in economics from the University of Alicante, Spain. He was a postdoctoral fellow at the Friedrich-Alexander University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany. Before joining Duke Kunshan, he held faculty positions in China, and had research visits at the University of Cambridge, the European University Institute, the National Bank of Hungary, and Massey University.
Dr. Xin Jin received her PhD from Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas. She works in the areas of development and energy economics. Currently she is particularly interested in the structural transformation experiences of the developing economies, noting that many of them have struggled to expand their manufacturing sectors and to achieve sustained economic growth and poverty reduction. In addition, she has long-term interests in the co-movements of time series data, adopting a state space approach. Her work has appeared in internationally renowned journals, including The Economic Journal, Journal of International Money and Finance, Journal of Futures Markets, and Energy Economics. Her teaching interests include Economic Principles and Macro-econometrics.
Claudia’s scientific agenda is centered around identifying what works to helps us lead healthier and more sustainable lives. Her research program focuses on the effectiveness of behavioral interventions to promote healthy and sustainable living – e.g., how to best promote energy savings, reduce food waste, increase cancer screening or blood donation. She translates behavioral science into practice to tackle these critical challenges, and to respond to calls for better informed policies. In order to do so, she uses a variety of methodological tools including (1) lab studies testing small-scale psychologically-driven interventions; (2) large field experiments testing how to scale-up behavioral interventions in natural settings; and (3) evidence-based policy evaluation, based on meta-analyses of randomized controlled trials and quasi-experiments. Claudia has a BSc degree in Social and Organizational Psychology and a MSc in Economics and Social Policy from the University of Lisbon, Portugal. She also holds a MSc in Decision Sciences and a PhD in Social Policy, both from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). She has served a postdoctoral researcher to ETH-Zurich in Singapore, and New York University in Abu Dhabi.
Yang’s research applies behavioral decision science to characterizing and communicating scientific results to inform risk-related decisions. More recently, she has been working on risk communication to better inform public health decisions, while her previous research focused on risk communication on advanced energy technologies. Her teaching interests at Duke Kunshan include behavioral science, health communication and decision making. She received her Ph.D. degree from the Department of Engineering and Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon University, where she also served as a postdoctoral research associate. She received her M.S. in nuclear engineering and B.A. in English literature and journalism from Tsinghua University.
Wen Zhou is an assistant professor of Evolutionary Anthropology. She holds a secondary appointment with the department of Evolutionary Anthropology at Duke university. Professor Zhou aims to understand what it means to be a human and the moral status a human is believed to deserve. Her current projects focus on dehumanization and its developmental origins. Her work also involves research on social hierarchy, human-animal relations and conservation, deploying an interdisciplinary approach drawn from social and developmental psychology. She teaches Social Psychology, Comparative Analysis of Behavior, and Judgment and Decision Making.
His broad research interests are climate variability, weather extremes, and atmospheric dynamics. The essential motivation for his research is to better understand and predict the behavior of the climate system, which has led to his focus on the variability of the large-scale atmospheric circulation and the related weather extremes. His teaching interests at Duke Kunshan include environmental science and physics. He has had papers published in leading academic journals including Nature Communications, Journal of Climate, and Journal of Atmospheric Sciences. He is a member of American Geophysical Union and American Meteorological Society. Ma has a B.A. in physics for Peking University and a Ph.D. in climate dynamics from Harvard University. After receiving his Ph.D., he joined Columbia University as an Earth Institute Fellow.
Jason Douglas Todd is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Duke Kunshan University, where he has taught since obtaining his PhD from Duke University in 2020. His research examines elections, responsiveness, and representation in democratic and authoritarian legislatures. Work published in the American Political Science Review, The Journal of Politics, Electoral Studies, and Political Behavior has investigated North Carolina’s county commissions, the U.S. Congress, and the Vietnamese National Assembly. Work in progress tackles American state legislatures, local Chinese People’s Congresses, Russian regional assemblies, and elections to over a dozen other deliberative bodies around the world. A lifelong Tarheel, Jason grew up in the foothills of western North Carolina, later attending the North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics and earning a B.A. in international studies at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He speaks Mandarin, loves reading to his two children, and drinks too much coffee.
Chi-Yeung Choi is an applied ecologist with expertise in animal ecology, conservation biology, wetland ecology and environmental management. He studies the relationship between animals and their environment. Current study systems include the ecology of migratory birds, with a focus on their foraging and movement ecology within and between coastal intertidal wetlands. This requires extensive fieldwork in many places ranging from Alaska and East Asia to Australia and New Zealand. The work has led to investigations of diet, habitat use, local movement, population dynamics as well as migration phenology and strategies, often using the latest technology in wildlife tracking and remote sensing. Based on the findings from these studies, long-term habitat quality monitoring, protected area boundary adjustment and integrated natural and artificial management are proposed to improve the habitats for migratory waterbirds. These efforts not only contribute to nature conservation, but also to the restoration of wetland ecosystems on which humans depend.
Choi has published in leading conservation journals including Conservation Letters, Conservation Biology and Biological Conservation. He has served as an editorial board member for Avian Research and Stilt, and an associate editor for Journal of Applied Ecology. He was appointed as a specialist by the Ministry of Ecology and Environment of the People’s Republic of China, Shenzhen Mangrove Wetlands Conservation Foundation and Zhilan Foundation.
Choi has a B.Sc. (1st class honors) in biological ecology from the University of New South Wales (Australia), an M.Sc. in ecology from Fudan University (China) and a Ph.D. in ecology from Massey University (New Zealand). Before joining Duke Kunshan, he worked at the University of Queensland (postdoctoral research fellow), Deakin University (associate research fellow) and Southern University of Science and Technology (research assistant professor).
Her research focuses on environmental economic and health economics. She studies questions related to environmental regulations, firm behavior, and health impacts of pollution. Her current projects analyze pollution exposure inequity, location decisions of firms and families in response to environmental regulations and public pressure, and effect of environmental regulation on various health outcomes. She has several papers published in leading academic journals including the Review of Economics and Statistics, Journal Environmental Economics and Management, the Review of Environmental Economics and Policy, and Journal of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economics.
Xiao holds a B.A. in accounting from Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, an M.A in Economics from North Carolina State University, and receives her Ph.D. in Agricultural and Applied Economics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2019. She worked in Heinz College at Carnegie Mellon University as a postdoctoral researcher from 2019 to 2021. Before joining DKU, she has worked as an assistant professor of economic at Hunan University.
His research focus is on the theory and empirics of international trade. He is especially interested in using general equilibrium trade models to address macroeconomic issues, such as global imbalances, the political economy of economic policy, migration, income inequality, economic geography and the welfare effects of globalization more generally. Some of his research is published in leading economics journals, such as the Review of Economic Studies, the Review of Economics and Statistics, The Economic Journal, the Journal of International Economics, etc. His teaching interests at Duke Kunshan include international trade, political economy, microeconomics, macroeconomics, mathematical economics.
Epifani has a Five-Year Degree in Economics and Social Sciences from Bocconi University, an MSc. in Economics also from Bocconi and a Ph.D. in Economics from Polytecnic University of Marche, Italy. Before joining Duke Kunshan, he was professor of international economics at the University of Nottingham (2014-25) and head of school of economics at the China campus (2014-17), associate professor of economics at Bocconi (2006-14), assistant professor of economics at the University of Parma (2001-06), and post-doctorate researcher at Bocconi (1998-2000).
Email: dku-gsi@dukekunshan.edu.cn
