Dr. Ariel Ortiz-Bobea receives prestigious award
Dr. Richard E. Just and Dr. Ariel Ortiz-Bobea
Image Credit: Edwin Remsberg
The University of Maryland Distinguished Dissertation Award for dissertations completed in 2013 will be presented this year on May 8 at the Graduate School Annual Fellowship and Award Celebration. The department is very pleased to announce that recent alumnus Dr. Ariel Ortiz-Bobea is one of the four recipients of this prestigious award.
His dissertation, "Essays on Climate Change Impacts and Adaptation for Agriculture," makes use of tremendously large datasets to re-examine economic models to improve climate change predictive ability. His work investigating corn production and the correlation of temperature and soil moisture reveals the inadequacies of prior models and casts into relief the shortcomings of typical data construction assumptions. Presented as an invited paper of the Agricultural and Applied Economics Association at the Allied Social Science Association meetings in Chicago in January 2012, the paper has now been published in the January 2013 issue of the American Journal of Agricultural Economics, co-authored with Dr. Richard E. Just.
Dr. Ortiz-Bobea also received several notable awards while he was pursing his degree. From the department, he received the Bessie H. Devault Award in 2010 as the author of the best paper by a second-year graduate student, as well as the Billy Lessley Award for Dissertation Excellence as the best dissertation this past December. His exemplary teaching assistance was recognized two years in a row by the University of Maryland's Center for Teaching Excellence and the Graduate School's Distinguished Teaching Assistant Award for 2010-2011 and 2011-2012. While he was conducting his dissertation research and producing an exceptionally large volume of results, he was concurrently serving as a consultant for the World Bank. Following his graduation in 2013, he has been a Fellow at Resources for the Future, a major think-tank in Washington DC on environmental and resource issues.
His considerable insights and abilities have been recognized further; he will be joining the tenure-track faculty at Cornell University this coming fall. Please join us in congratulating Dr. Ortiz-Bobea on receiving the university’s award for dissertation excellence, and wishing him well in his future endeavors.
