Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences

Dr. Mahmoudi joined the faculty of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Fall 2019. She received her Ph.D. in Economics from University of Nevada, Reno in 2017 with research focused on applied macroeconomics.

I joined the faculty of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute as an Assistant Professor of Economics in Fall 2018. I study innovation and economic growth in the context of an interconnected global economy. My current work focuses on policy issues related to the international protection of intellectual property. Examples include analyses of the international market for counterfeit products, technology transfer to developing economies through multinational firms, and the implications of firm patenting behavior across markets.

Kenneth L. Simons researches the dynamics of industrial organization and technological change. His work has probed the causes of industry shakeouts, testing between alternative theories and exploring issues including sources of advantage to surviving firms and the role of technological innovation.

Dr. Huh is an applied microeconomist with primary research interests in health economics and public economics. He has examined how government insurance programs, such as Medicare and Medicaid, may help improve people's access to health care services and health outcomes. His work focuses on the supply side of the market and how providers respond to health policy interventions.More generally, Dr. Huh seeks to study important policy-relevant questions in applied microeconomics. His projects also include topics in urban economics and environmental economics.

As an experimental and behavioral economist, I pursue research that explores how cognitive constraints and social identity shape economic decision-making. I use controlled experiments to identify causal mechanisms behind observed disparities in behavior and outcomes, particularly in the contexts of limited attention and identity-based discrimination. My work contributes to the empirical foundations of behavioral economics, the methodological development of identity measurement in experiments, and the growing literature on economic inclusion.

Dr. Peng Joined RPI in 2018. Prior to that, he taught at SUNY Albany from 2008 to 2017. He received his PhD in Economics from Yale Univeristy in 2008, his Master in Statistics in 2001 and Bachelor in Economics and Mathematics in 1999 from Macquarie University in Australia. Dr. Peng is an econometrician, He currently works on measuring forecasting accuracy and high dimensional statistics.

Dorit Nevo is a Professor of Management Information Systems at the Lally School of Management. She joined RPI in 2012, and prior to that was an Associate Professor at the Schulich School of Business in Toronto. Professor Nevo obtained her BA and MS in Economics and PhD in Management Information Systems. Since joining RPI, she held the roles of program director for the MS in Business Analytics, Acting Associate Dean for the Lally school of Management, and MS and MBA programs director. Dorit’s research focuses on interactions between computers and their users within the business environment.

I am an experimental economist working at the intersection of behavioral, public, and labor economics. My research investigates how economic decision-making is shaped by social context, institutional environments, individual differences, and increasingly, by interactions with technology. I design controlled laboratory and field experiments to uncover causal mechanisms behind key economic behaviors, with a focus on cooperation, fairness, identity-driven preferences, and human-technology interactions.

John M. Gowdy was a Professor of Economics and Professor of Science and Technology Studies at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York. He is the recipient of the Herman Daly Award for contributions to ecological economics. “Throughout my career I have been interested in the relationship between economic systems, social institutions and the natural world. My current research, in collaboration with evolutionary biologists, focuses on the evolution of economic systems. I feel fortunate to be an economist in this period of rapid change in the field.