Welcome. I am an associate professor in the Department of Agricultural, Environmental and Development Economics at the Ohio State University. I’m also an associate editor at the American Journal of Agricultural Economics, an ATAI affiliate, a DLL affiliate, and a member of IFPRI’s ARENA team. I completed my PhD at Cornell’s Dyson School; Christopher Barrett was my advisor. 

In my research I examine the factors that drive chronic poverty in poor, agricultural settings. Often that means I focus on agricultural productivity and/or linked dynamics between biophysical systems and human welfare. A few of my projects focus on soils, agriculture and micronutrient malnutrition. For instance, I am investigating linkages between soil minerals/metals, crop mineral concentration, and human mineral status in Nepal, India and Malawi. I have a few papers examining seasonality in nutritional status in poor settings. I am currently examining the long-run implications of Green Revolution technologies for rural inequality and nutritional status in India. A lot of my work also focuses on measurement error, a chronic problem in agricultural and climate data.

I am also interested in linkages between health and poverty, both in the US and abroad. A couple of my papers examine intergenerational income and human capital transmission — and in particular, the role of maternal education and maternal health on child health. I’m slowly moving into work on (agro-)forestry and climate change adaptation/mitigation in poor agricultural settings. In 2021 I began work quantifying police time spend on mental health crises across the US (watch for a working paper soon!), and I am currently beginning work on mental/behavioral crisis response in Columbus, Ohio: how it works now, and how to improve it. (Here’s the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation write-up on that project.)

My CV is here. Research page. Google scholar page. I moderate a geospatial data repository, and I’m on Twitter as leahbevis. A plug for my awesome department: here’s a map of our PhD graduate placements from 2007-2021.