I am a PhD student in Geography at UC Santa Barbara. My research focuses on food security and spatial econometrics. I am interested in how trade liberalization impacts spatial price behavior among agricultural commodity markets. One of my dissertation papers analyzes how the response of Mexican maize prices to local and global influences varies over space and time during different stages of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). I am also working with colleagues at the UCSB Climate Hazards Group to examine maize prices, climate trends, and child malnutrition in Kenya. Currently I am attempting to make spatially explicit maize price forecasts for Kenya and then extend those methods to other food insecure regions. Finally, in my spatial econometrics research I examine standard error bias in spatial panel models with time varying spatial correlation.
