It is hard to believe that another academic year–my fourth at the University of Minnesota–has come and gone. Graduate commencement for students in the College of Food, Agricultural, and Natural Resource Sciences was held on Friday, April 28, and given that this is my fourth year at Minnesota, my first batch of PhD students was graduating this year.
The Department of Applied Economics minted a number of new PhDs this year, who all deserve congratulations for the tremendous amount of work they have done and for their contributions to research in applied economics.
For my part, I am particularly excited about the three of my students who have successfully defended and are about to start their research careers. Starting this summer,
- Johanna Fajardo-Gonzalez, with whom I have worked on the quinoa paper, will be an assistant professor in the School of Economics and Finance at Universidad EAFIT in Medellin, Colombia, where our department placed another student last year.
- Yu Na Lee, with whom I have worked on this article as well as two soon-to-be-released working papers in which we used experimental methods to look at the effect of behavior in the face of price uncertainty, will be an assistant professor of Food, Agricultural, and Resource Economics at the University of Guelph, in one of the top agricultural economics programs in Canada.
- Lindsey Novak, with whom I have worked on female genital cutting, among other things, will be an assistant professor in the Department of Economics at Colby College.
Congratulations to all three, and best of luck in your new jobs! Johanna, Yu Na, and Lindsey are part of a significant upward trend in our department’s placements over the last few years, during which we placed PhD students in tenure-track positions at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo (twice), Lewis and Clark College, North Dakota State University, Purdue University, Universidad EAFIT (another one), University of Georgia, Wageningen Universiteit, and the College of Wooster.
Now that the academic year is over, I’m hoping to have more time to blog more regularly than I have these past few months!