Princeton School of Public and International Affairs

  • Misra, Mayank (‘17 - ‘19)

    Princeton School of Public and International Affairs

    Mayank’s research interests lie at the intersection of human collective behavior, ecosystems, and climate change. He is particularly interested in socio-ecological coevolution dynamics and how human populations manage risk across different organizational and temporal scales.

    At the Levin Lab Mayank focuses on how socio-ecological relationships are transformed when tribal populations are integrated with State structures and formal markets. He studies the effects of integration on integrated groups, their native ecosystems, and the resilience of States and markets themselves. On a larger scale he also studies the effect of losing diverse socio-ecological relationships on human adaptability and resilience to global catastrophic risk.

    Mayank was formerly a civil rights lawyer in the High Courts of Delhi and Bombay, and at the Supreme Court of India. He completed a masters in Public Administration from the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs in 2014 and consulted for the Open Society foundations and UN peace keeping, before returning to Princeton as a PhD student.

  • Schulhofer, Sam (‘08 - ‘11)

    Princeton School of Public and International Affairs

    Schulhofer-Wohl’s research focused on macroeconomics, economic development and applied econometrics. Projects studied methods for distinguishing age, period and cohort effects; changes in the age structure of mortality in the course of an economy’s development; and the implications of heterogeneous preferences and heterogeneous income risk in macroeconomics. Ongoing research analyzes the effect of recent economic volatility on consumer behavior and the nature of migration in developing countries.

  • Oppenheimer, Michael (‘08 - ‘11)

    Princeton School of Public and International Affairs

    Michael Oppenheimer is the Albert G. Milbank Professor of Geosciences and International Affairs and the Princeton Environmental Institute. He is director of the Program in Science, Technology and Environmental Policy (STEP) at the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs and faculty associate of the Atmospheric and Ocean Sciences Program, Princeton Environmental Institute, and the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies. He is also a visiting professor of law at NYU School of Law.

    He joined the Princeton faculty after more than two decades with The Environmental Defense Fund, a non-governmental, environmental organization, where he served as chief scientist and manager of the Climate and Air Program. Oppenheimer is a long-time participant in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) which won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007, serving most recently as a lead author of the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report. He is currently a member of the National Academy of Sciences’ Panel on Alternative Liquid Transportation Fuels. He is also a science adviser to The Environmental Defense Fund.

    His interests include science and policy of the atmosphere, particularly climate change and its impacts. Much of his research aims to understand the potential for “dangerous” outcomes of increasing levels of greenhouse gases by exploring the effects of global warming on ecosystems such as coral reefs, on the ice sheets, and on sea level. He also studies the role played by nongovernmental organizations in the policy arena, the role of scientific learning and scientific assessment in decisions on problems of global change, and the potential value of precautionary frameworks.

  • Xu, Yuan (‘08 - ‘09)

    Princeton School of Public and International Affairs

    Yuan studied China’s goal process of SO2 emission control, including goal setting, goal implementation, policy enactment, policy enforcement and goal attainment. The objective was to provide insights on achieving a CO2 goal. His research interests focused on energy, public policy and the environment.

  • Whitworth, Alex (‘11 - ‘11)

    Princeton School of Public and International Affairs

    Alex’s research is on global environmental assessment institutions such as the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the scientific assessments of ozone depletion, and the Inter-governmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES). He is using a social science approach to understand the role of such institutions in international politics, and investigating the conditions which lead to their creation in some environmental issue-areas. He is also interested in the design and governance of environmental assessments, methods of measuring their “effectiveness”, and the interaction of science and politics more generally.

  • Saikawa, Eri (‘08 - ‘10)

    Princeton School of Public and International Affairs

    Eri conducted interdisciplinary research that covered a broad range of topics from international relations and the politics of East Asia to atmospheric chemistry, combining them into an overall interest in the diffusion mechanism in environmental policymaking. Motivated by the impact of rapid motorization in developing countries linked to climate change, she focused on air pollution from the transport sector and various efforts to regulate it. This leads to analysis of how countries adopt standards and what the impacts are due to such adoption.

  • Lutzy, Rebecca (‘10 - ‘11)

    Princeton School of Public and International Affairs

    Rebecca Lutzy is a Ph.D. student in The Woodrow Wilson School’s Science, Technology, and Environmental Policy (STEP) program. Her doctoral research focuses on the impact of Congressional politics, including political polarization, on United States federal climate and clean energy policies. Her research approach draws from political science methods for analyzing legislator preferences and from climate and energy analysis methods for incorporating energy use, production, and greenhouse gas emissions data and goals.

    Among other topics, she seeks to distinguish geographic and natural resource determinants of legislator preferences from other stakeholder and interest group impacts on policymaking.

    Rebecca spent May through September of 2010 as an energy and environment Policy Fellow for Senator Robert Menendez of New Jersey, focused on legislation considered by the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee and the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee. She was born and raised in New Jersey.

  • Lefevre, Nicholas (‘08 - ‘10)

    Princeton School of Public and International Affairs

    Nicolas’ research interest was the politics of technological change in the scope of climate change mitigation. In particular, he was interested in political resistance resulting from foreseen economic hardships at the industry level. His research focuses on how such resistance can be assessed, predicted and integrated into more conventional economic models of climate change mitigation.

  • Kanter, David (‘11 - ‘13)

    Princeton School of Public and International Affairs

    David’s research focuses on how and to what effect the Montreal Protocol could control nitrous oxide (N2O), one of the most abundant ozone depleting substances and greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. By investigating both the effect of nitrogen fertilizer application on global N2O emissions, as well as possible policy approaches for the Montreal Protocol, he is hoping to track this issue from its source to its solution. With faith in the effectiveness of a single international climate agreement quickly waning, David is convinced the Montreal Protocol has an important role to play in mitigating the effects of global climate change.