Kurt Waldman

About

Kurt Waldman is an assistant professor in the Department of Global Development at Cornell University. He studies judgment and decision making related to environmental sustainability, climate adaptation and food security. He uses interdisciplinary quantitative methods, drawing on behavioral experiments, econometrics, and often integrating social and environmental data. Prior to Cornell, Kurt was an assistant professor in the Department of Geography at Indiana University and a postdoctoral research fellow in the Ostrom Workshop. He holds a MS in Applied Economics from Cornell University and a Ph.D. in Sustainability from Michigan State University.

Research Focus

Kurt broadly studies environmental decision making. His research focuses on cognition and decision making related to climate adaptation, sustainable agricultural technology adoption and food security. He is interested in the role of heuristics and cognitive biases in environmental decision making and how decision science can be used to enhance the sustainability of policy outcomes. In his work he uses a combination of household level survey data, behavioral experiments with decision makers, and environmental data. Kurt’s geographic focus is predominately on arid regions of Africa, but he also works on these topics in the US and around the globe. For more information about Kurt’s research areas please see his personal website and for a complete list of publications see his google scholar profile.

Grant-funded Research

• Bridging the spatial and cognitive dimensions of farmer climate adaptation, Funded by the National Science Foundation (BCS- 2215426), 2022-2026, $400,000, Principal Investigator with co-PI Meha Jain (Environment & Sustainability, U. Michigan).

Teaching

• Environmental decisions (Spring 2024)