Prior to starting my PhD, I grew coffee in my personal farm and held field agronomist and extension agent positions across Colombia that exposed me to the social and economic issues facing rural communities. I took these issues to the Department of Agricultural and Consumer Economics of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and built a research program that provides evidence-based tools for addressing the challenges of climate variability for coffee cultivation, proposes novel methods for technology diffusion that leverage within-family channels of information exchange, and improves the understanding of the impact of conflict resolution processes on legal and illegal economic activity in multilateral conflicts. Simultaneously, I have led grant-writing activities that resulted in research projects in Nicaragua and at the International Center for Tropical Agriculture in Colombia.

I am on the 2020-2021 Job Market and available for interviews.

Research Fields: Development Economics | Statistics | Agricultural Economics | Environmental Economics

Research Interests: Rural Development | Technology Diffusion | Coffee | Civil Conflict

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Affiliation: Department of Agricultural and Consumer Economics, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign