Kyle Emerick received his PhD in Agricultural and Resource Economics from UC Berkeley in 2014. His research is in development economics — with a particular focus on the economics of agricultural development. He has studied the role of technology in reducing risk for the smallholder farmers in poor countries, the importance of property rights for rural-urban migration, and the efficacy of farmer field days in boosting technology adoption in India. His work has appeared in journals such as the American Economic Review, American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, the Review of Economics and Statistics, and the Journal of Development Economics.

Dr. Carly Muir is a Geospatial Analyst at the AidData lab in the Global Research Institute of William & Mary. She is formally trained in the field of Geography and specializes in climatology and land system science, with a specific focus on investigating dynamics of human-environment interaction and climate change. Her research is interdisciplinary and uses spatial analyses to examine sustainable agricultural land use. She has conducted field work in several African nations, including her dissertation work, which focused on evaluating large scale land acquisitions in Ethiopia. The overarching goal of her work is to employ geospatial techniques for improving synergies between agricultural production and ecological sustainability. Previously, she was a graduate instructor at the University of Florida where she taught classes in geography, sustainability, and geographic information systems.

Dr. Kunwar Singh is a Senior Geospatial Scientist at the AidData research lab and an Affiliate Faculty in the Center for Geospatial Analysis at William & Mary. Kunwar has more than 20 years of experience in remote sensing data acquisition, processing, and analysis, including the applications of light detection and ranging (LiDAR) and drones to measure, map, and model land characteristics and resources. His research is at the nexus of land change and geospatial sciences where he investigates how the terrestrial system can support future land conversions and resource consumption under a changing climate. He uses geospatial data and technologies supplemented with data from ground observations and weather stations to develop workflows for large spatiotemporal data processing, assess broad-scale land change and its implications to natural resources, and measure outcomes of new adaptations to diminishing natural resources

Brad Sagara is Mercy Corps’ Director for Research and Learning and lead on the USAID-funded Resilience, Evaluation, Analysis and Learning award (REAL) and oversees the agency’s global Resilience Research portfolio, where his team generates robust evidence that responds to major program and policy questions on resilience-related topics. This includes but is not limited to evaluating the effectiveness of resilience building investments, social and market systems dynamics in humanitarian and development response, resilience in fragile and conflict affected contexts, and return on investment of resilience building efforts.