I’m an adjunct faculty member teaching biostatistics in the School of Undergraduate and Graduate Studies. My original training was in economics, and my doctoral dissertation on occupational safety and health was later published as Markets and Mortality: Economics, Dangerous Work and the Value of Human Life by Cambridge University Press. More recent books include a pair of economics textbooks and, in 2022, Alligators in the Arctic and How to Avoid Them: Science, Economics and the Challenge of Catastrophic Climate Change, also published by Cambridge.

I’ve spent many years consulting for UN agencies, producing reports on occupational health, child labor and the effects of HIV/AIDS on the global workforce. Much of this was undertaken in interdisciplinary public health teams. I’ve also worked with government, environmental and labor groups in the US, including the Economic Policy Institute, for whom I coauthored the recent report, “Risk Without Reward: The Myth of Compensating Wage Differentials for Hazardous Work”.

My teaching experience includes Smith College, Hamilton College, Michigan State University and Evergreen State College, from which I retired in 2019. I taught a wide range of courses in fields such as political economy, environmental studies, global development and undergraduate and graduate statistics. My interest in statistics lies especially in the interconnections between technical methods and problems of epistemology, and between quantitative modeling and broader knowledge of physical and social systems – ensuring that the tail balances the dog but doesn’t wag it.