Penn Climate Seminar Series: R. Jisung Park Penn
Penn Climate is excited to welcome Professor R. Jisung Park to the Penn Climate Seminar Series for his talk Adapting to a Warmer World: The Effects of Heat on Learning and Labor on Wednesday, October 15. Park is an Assistant Professor at the School of Social Policy & Practice and holds a secondary appointment at the Department of Business Economics and Public Policy at the Wharton School. As an environmental and labor economist, his research investigates the relationship between environmental factors and economic opportunities. Park leverages data, quasi-experimental methods, and economic analysis to explore how environmental changes impact human well-being and design effective policy responses.
Park’s research on heat and learning analyzes data from millions of test scores to reveal how physical learning environments impact gaps in educational achievement and economic inequality. His work examines how heat affects labor market inequality, the consequences of natural disasters for human capital, and how workers and firms adapt to environmental change.
Park earned his PhD in Economics from Harvard University as an NSF Fellow and holds master’s degrees in Environmental Change and Management (MSc) and Development Economics (MSc) from the University of Oxford. His research is featured in journals such as the American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, the Journal of Human Resources, and Nature Human Behavior, and cited frequently in media outlets including the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, the BBC, and NPR.
Park has also advised policymakers and practitioners worldwide, providing congressional testimony to the U.S. House of Representatives and briefings for the United Nations, the World Bank, the U.S. Department of Commerce, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the U.S. Department of Labor, and the United Kingdom Department for International Development. Before joining Penn, Park was a member of the faculty at UCLA and a post-doctoral fellow at Harvard. Penn Climate is delighted to welcome Park for the second installment in our Seminar Series, where he will discuss how we can better understand and adapt to the economic challenges of a warming world.
