Louis Preonas is an associate professor in the Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics at the University of Maryland, College Park. He is an energy and environmental economist. Much of his research focuses on interacting market distortions in U.S. energy markets, including market power in U.S. coal transportation. He also works at the intersection of environmental and development economics, focusing on the economics of rural electrification and wholesale electricity supply in India. He also studies the intersection of energy, water, and agriculture in California, estimating how farmers respond to increased groundwater pumping costs and extreme heat. Preonas holds a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley and a B.A. from the University of Michigan.
Expert Type: Grantee
Joshua Linn
Josh Linn is a professor in the Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics at the University of Maryland and a senior fellow at Resources for the Future. His research centers on the effects of environmental policies and economic incentives for new technologies in the transportation, electricity, and industrial sectors. His transportation research assesses passenger vehicle taxation, electric vehicle subsidies, and fuel economy standards in the United States and Europe. He has examined the effects of Beijing’s vehicle ownership restrictions on travel behavior, labor supply, and fertility. Linn’s work on the electricity sector has compared the effectiveness of policy instruments in promoting new technology and reducing emissions of carbon dioxide and local air pollutants. He has compared the roles of natural gas prices and environmental regulation in explaining coal mine closures and the shift away from coal-fired generation in the United States. He has examined the implications of low-cost storage for reducing electricity sector emissions, as well as the factors driving electricity demand and implications for retail prices. Linn was a senior economist at the Council of Economic Advisers from 2014–2015, and he has served on a National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine committee on light-duty fuel economy. He was a co-editor for the Journal of Environmental Economics and Management. He received his Ph.D. in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Corbett Grainger
Corbett Grainger is a professor at University of Wisconsin–Madison, where he has been on faculty since 2010. His research studies the effects of environmental and resource policies on different stakeholders and households, the political economy of environmental policies, and distributional impacts of market-based environmental and natural resource policies. Grainger teaches courses at the undergraduate and Ph.D. levels in environmental and resource economics, and he is co-editor at Land Economics and a research fellow at CESifo in Munich. He has a Ph.D. in economics from University of California, Santa Barbara.
Morgan Edwards
Morgan Edwards is an assistant professor at the La Follette School of Public Affairs at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and affiliated faculty with the Nelson Institute Center for Sustainability and the Global Environment. Her research focuses on just energy responses to the climate crisis across policymaking scales. She draws on mixed quantitative and qualitative methods, combining large datasets and community knowledge with systems modeling. Current projects focus on designing policy solutions for equitable building electrification and modeling climate-tech innovation and job transitions. Prior to coming to Madison, she was a president’s postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Global Sustainability at the University of Maryland. Edwards holds a Ph.D. in data, systems, and society from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a master’s degree in technology and policy from MIT, and a bachelor’s degree in environmental science and economics from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Mokshda Kaul
Mokshda Kaul is a postdoctoral research associate at the Nelson Institute Center for Sustainability and the Global Environment at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and is an incoming assistant professor of energy governance in the Environmental Studies Program at the University of Oregon. Her research employs interdisciplinary approaches that integrate economics and political science to examine energy and climate policy from design through implementation. Specifically, she investigates how energy policies can be leveraged to decarbonize energy systems in equitable and inclusive ways. This work currently involves research on energy policies for energy technology deployment, sustainable clean energy production, and fossil fuel worker transitions. Kaul holds a Ph.D. in sustainable energy from the School of Sustainability at Arizona State University and master’s and bachelor’s degrees in economics from Mumbai University in India.
Todd Gerarden
Todd Gerarden is an assistant professor at Cornell University in the Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management. His research interests span energy and environmental economics, public economics, and empirical industrial organization. His recent work focuses on markets for renewable energy and the economics of energy technology innovation. Gerarden obtained a Ph.D. in public policy from Harvard University.
Saba Waheed
Saba Waheed is the director of the UCLA Labor Center. Prior to this role, she spent 11 years as the center’s research director. In her time at the UCLA Labor Center, she has built the research infrastructure for, and led, more than 40 studies in partnership with community and labor organizations. Among these was the first-ever study of domestic work employers, a multi-year study of workers and learners, and the first national study on nail salon workers and owners. She has also conducted research related to gig workers, young workers, Black workers, LGBTQ+ grocery workers, retail workers, fast-food workers, and restaurant workers. With nearly 20 years of experience developing community-led research projects, Waheed’s work is grounded in the “research justice” framework, which she co-developed to address structural inequities in research. In addition to her research work, she is an award-winning radio producer and writer. She co-produces the podcast Re:Work, a storytelling show about workers, and she co-wrote and co-produced the animated film, “I am a #YoungWorker.” Previously, she was a part of the shared leadership team and the research director of DataCenter and a researcher at the Urban Justice Center. Waheed received an M.A. in anthropology from Columbia University and a B.A. in English and religious studies from the University of California, Berkeley.
Andres Sawicki
Andres Sawicki is a professor of law at the University of Miami, director of the Data, Ethics, & Society Program at the Frost Institute for Data Science & Computing, and director of the Business of Innovation, Law, & Technology Concentration at the University of Miami School of Law. An internationally recognized scholar of intellectual property law, his work explores how legal rules shape creativity, innovation, and emerging technologies. Sawicki’s recent research includes “The Law of Creativity?” (Cornell Law Review, 2025), an argument for grounding IP in the sociology and psychology of creativity, and “The Terms and Conditions of Generative AI” (funded by the Frost Institute), which examines how terms of service influence consumers’ rights and liabilities when using generative AI. He is also a co-author of Patent Law: An Open-Access Casebook, the most-downloaded patent law casebook on SSRN. Sawicki received his J.D. from the University of Chicago Law School.
Sean O’Brady
Sean O’Brady is an assistant professor at the DeGroote School of Business at McMaster University. He has broad interest in labor unions, precarity, worker power, and employment institutions. He is currently investigating the impacts of digitalization on job quality and well-being in the telecommunications and retail industries. He is also involved in a project examining how employers adapt to increases in the minimum wage. His work has been published in outlets such as the British Journal of Industrial Relations, Industrial Relations: A Journal of Economy, and Human Resource Management Journal. It has also been featured in Forbes, The Globe and Mail, CBC, BNN Bloomberg, and elsewhere. In addition to working at McMaster University, O’Brady has research affiliations with Cornell University’s Ithaca Co-Lab, the Inter-University Research Centre on Globalization and Work, and the McMaster Centre for Research on Employment and Work. He received his Ph.D. from the Université de Montréal School of Industrial Relations.
John E. McCarthy
John McCarthy is an associate professor at Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations. His research examines how to build and sustain collaborative organizations and how employee participation shapes both worker experiences and broader organizational outcomes. More recently, his work has focused on the responsible adoption of emerging technologies—particularly generative AI—and their implications for the future of work. His scholarship has appeared in leading outlets, including: Industrial and Labor Relations Review, Industrial Relations, British Journal of Industrial Relations, Journal of Applied Psychology, Personnel Psychology, and Harvard Education Press. Before joining Cornell, McCarthy was a visiting doctoral student and research fellow at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and a postdoctoral fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sloan School of Management. He earned his Ph.D. in industrial relations and human resource management from Rutgers University’s School of Management and Labor Relations.