About

what + why

TWEEDS is the workshop in environmental economics and/or data science.

Our fifth (almost) annual meeting will be in Portland, OR; 25–26 April 2025.

During these two days, workshop participants will hear from experts in data-science methods and tools—machine learning, remote sensing, natural language processing, cloud computing, geospatial data analysis—and applied environmental economics—including climate change, energy policy, environmental justice, transportation, and the interchange between air/water quality and health.

In one set of talks, presenters will focus on the actual methods and tools that they develop and use. In the second set of talks, presenters will display more complete projects that depict how these methods and tools help us learn about the nexus between the environment, the economy, and policy.

Image credit: Modified Copernicus Sentinel data (2016), processed by ESA, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO

Why should economists care?

Contributions in economics increasingly rely upon developments within fields outside of economics—particularly fields relating to data science and statistics (e.g., big-data tools, machine learning, spatial statistics, remote sensing). However, developments in these fields often take considerable time to settle into the attention and repertoire of economists—particularly when the methods require substantial time and effort to master.

Why should data scientists care?

Similarly, the policy work, behavioral insights, causal acuity, and general applications of economics often fail to close the loop—quietly residing within academic economic journals, instead of flowing back toward the data scientists who originally developed the tools, methods, and data products. Our workshop aims to solve these problems by literally bringing together these experts from across academia, government, and industry.

Organizers

Ed Rubin

Host + Organizing Committee

Ed is an assistant professor in economics at the University of Oregon. His research intersects tools from data science and causally informed econometrics to examine problems of environmental quality and social inequality.

Patrick Baylis

Organizing Committee

Patrick is an assistant professor and environmental economist at the University of British Columbia. He studies how people respond to environmental threats like climate change, air pollution, and wildfires.

Tamma Carleton

Organizing Committee

Tamma is an environmental and resource economist, leveraging tools from applied microeconomics, remote sensing, and climate science to quantify the interactions between economic development and large-scale environmental change.

Hannah Druckenmiller

Organizing Committee

Hannah is an assistant professor at Caltech who work provide empirically based estimates for the environmental benefits and economic costs associated with natural resource protection. Hannah's also has a strong interest in developing novel data and methods to enable progress on historically intractable problems in these areas of research.

Grant McDermott

Organizing Committee

Grant is a principal economist at Amazon. His research mixes classical econometrics, Bayesian methods, GIS, and (increasingly) newer data science tools like machine learning.

Eric Zou

Organizing Committee

Eric is an assistant professor at the Ross School of Business and the University of Michigan. His research focuses on causally identifying links between environmental quality, health, and regulation.