Integrating Hydrologic and Ecological Models

School of Public Policy
University of Maryland, Baltimore County

Dr. Yusuke Kuwayama is an Assistant Professor in the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and a Fellow at Resources for the Future (RFF) in Washington, DC. He is a Principal Investigator on a project supported by the National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center (SESYNC) titled Advancing Integrated Process-Based Modeling of Complex Socio-Environmental Systems. He also currently serves as Director of the Consortium for the Valuation of Applications Benefits Linked with Earth Science (VALUABLES).

Dr. Kuwayama’s research focuses on the economics of water resource management. He strives to conduct economic analysis that leads to effective and efficient policy solutions for three major problems related to water quality and scarcity:

• Inefficient water use in the agricultural sector;
• Tradeoffs across economic and ecosystem uses of water; and
• Wastewater management.

The methods and techniques Dr. Kuwayama uses to address these issues depend on the specific research question, but usually consist of applied microeconomic theory, dynamic optimization, applied econometrics, and policy analysis. Dr. Kuwayama is particularly interested in interdisciplinary approaches to address questions involving sustainable use and management of coupled human-natural systems, especially work that requires modeling human decision-making, hydrologic and ecological processes, and the connections between them.

Dr. Kuwayama completed his bachelor’s degree in Economics at Amherst College and his MS and PhD in Economics and Agricultural and Applied Economics at University of Illinois-Urbana Champaign.