Macroeconomic Implications for Decarbonization Policies and Actions: Proceedings of a Workshop (2025)
Chapter: Appendix C: Planning Committee Biographies
Appendix C
Planning Committee Biographies
Sanya Carley (Co-Chair) is the Presidential Distinguished Professor of Energy Policy and City Planning at the Stuart Weitzman School of Design, and Faculty Co-director of the Kleinman Center for Energy Policy at the University of Pennsylvania. She holds a secondary appointment at the Wharton School, is a University Fellow at Resources for the Future, and co-directs the Energy Justice Lab. Carley’s research focuses on energy justice and just transitions, energy insecurity, electricity and transportation markets, and public perceptions of energy infrastructure and technologies. She is an author of the Fifth National Climate Assessment report. Carley received a B.A. in economics and sustainable development from Swarthmore College, an M.S. in urban and regional planning from the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and a Ph.D. in public policy from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She currently serves on the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine Innovation Policy Forum and the Roundtable on Macroeconomics and Climate-related Risks and Opportunities.
Jean-Francois Mercure (Co-Chair) is an Associate Professor in Climate Policy at the Global Systems Institute, University of Exeter, United Kingdom, following a secondment as Senior Climate Economist at the World Bank. His research focuses on macroeconomics and innovation economics, developing models and methods for public policy appraisal for assessing the effectiveness and macro- and socioeconomic impacts of diverse types of low-carbon, energy, and climate policies. At the World Bank, he headed $8 million of projects aiming to build capacity in ministries of finance and the World Bank around economic analytics to inform low-carbon transition policy. Prior to that, he headed a £5 million international research consortium commissioned by the U.K. government, called ‘Economics of Energy Innovation and System Transition,’ working with stakeholders in India, China, Brazil, the United Kingdom, and European Union. He helped raise awareness of and provide analytics for assessing transition risks, including an early assessment of the macroeconomic impacts of stranded fossil fuel assets.
He authored the book Complexity Economics for Environmental Governance at Cambridge University Press. Mercure received an M.S. in physics at the Université de Montréal, Canada and a Ph.D. in physics and complexity science from the University of St. Andrews, Scotland before transitioning to a career in economics.
James (Jae) Edmonds is a Researcher at the Joint Global Change Research Institute, a collaboration between the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, where he is Chief Scientist and Battelle Fellow, and the University of Maryland, College Park, where he is College Park Professor of Public Policy. He is one of the pioneers in the field of the integrated analysis of human and physical Earth systems. He began development of the Global Change Analysis Model (GCAM) in 1978. GCAM enables simultaneous analysis of global and regional energy, technology, economy, land, water, atmosphere, and climate systems on time scales ranging from decades to centuries. He has served as lead author on every major Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change assessment. Edmonds received a Ph.D. in economics from Duke University.
Marc Hafstead is a Fellow at Resources for the Future (RFF) and the Director of RFF’s Carbon Pricing Initiative. His research has primarily focused on the evaluation and design of federal and state-level climate and energy policies using sophisticated multi-sector models of the U.S. economy. He co-authored Confronting the Climate Challenge: U.S. Policy Options to evaluate the environmental and economic impacts of various federal climate policy proposals. Hafstead’s research has also analyzed the distributional and employment impacts of carbon pricing. He co-authored the paper “Impacts of a Carbon Tax across US Household Income Groups: What Are the Equity-Efficiency Trade-Offs?” which won the Journal of Public Economics 2021 Atkinson Award for best paper published in the journal between 2018 and 2020. Hafstead received a B.A. in mathematical methods in the social sciences from Northwestern University and a Ph.D. in economics from Stanford University, and he completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the Stanford Institute of Economic and Policy Research.
Paulina Jaramillo is a Professor of Engineering and Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon University and the Co-director of the Open Energy Outlook Initiative. Her past research focused on life cycle assessment of energy systems with an emphasis on climate change impacts and mitigation research. She is currently involved in multidisciplinary research projects to better understand the social, economic, and environmental implications of a low-carbon transition in the U.S. energy system. Jaramillo’s research and education efforts also include issues related to energy access and development in the Global South. Jaramillo was a coordinating lead author for the “Transportation” chapter of the Working Group III report that was part of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Sixth National Climate
Assessment report. She was a 2020 Andrew Carnegie Fellow of the Carnegie Corporation of New York. Jaramillo received a B.S. in civil and environmental engineering from Florida International University and an M.S. and a Ph.D. in civil and environmental engineering from Carnegie Mellon University. Jaramillo serves on the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine Roundtable on Macroeconomics and Climate-related Risks and Opportunities and previously served on the planning committee for the Workshop on the Dynamics of Climate and the Macroeconomy.
Diego Känzig is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Economics at Northwestern University, a Faculty Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research, and a Research Affiliate at the Centre for Economic Policy Research. His research interests are in macroeconomics and macro-finance with a focus on climate change and inequality. In his work, he studies the role of energy and climate change for financial and macroeconomic fluctuations and how economic inequality and household finance matter for the macroeconomy and macroeconomic policy. His research has been published in leading peer-reviewed journals including the American Economic Review and the Journal of Monetary Economics. Känzig received an M.Sc. in economics from the Universities of Bern and Basel and a Ph.D. in economics from London Business School.
Wei Peng is an Assistant Professor of Public and International Affairs and the Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment at Princeton University. Her research uses computational models to quantify difficult trade-offs of climate policy across social, political, and environmental aspects. Peng currently leads two main projects: 1) Political Economy in Integrated Assessment Modeling (PE-IAM), and 2) Health Effects of Deep Decarbonization (HEALED). Prior to joining Princeton, she was an Assistant Professor of International Affairs and Civil and Environmental Engineering at the Pennsylvania State University. Her research has been published in Nature, Nature Climate Change, Nature Sustainability, and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, among others, and has been featured in national and local media such as Public Broadcasting Service and National Public Radio. She also served as a co-author of the Fifth National Climate Assessment. Peng received a B.S. in environmental sciences from Peking University, China, and a Ph.D. in science, technology, and environmental policy from Princeton University, and was a Giorgio Ruffolo Post-Doctoral Fellow and Research Associate at the Harvard Kennedy School.
