Professional Journey

UChicago's Existential Risk Laboratory (XRisk) is focused on pioneering undergraduate and graduate multidisciplinary research into some of the largest threats to humankind. It's yearly cohort is split into four subgroups (AI Safety / Governance, Biosecurity, Cascading Risks, and Nuclear Security) and includes students from a variety of STEM and political science backgrounds.

On the Cascading Risks team over the 10-week fellowship, I completed an independent research project that addresses the implications of nuclear winter on international food trade, helping to build a framework for what international food relations would look like without a traditional no-export post-disaster assumption. To do this, I was mentored by UChicago Professor and Statistician Mihai Anitescu. This process involved:

1) Generating a five page comprehensive literature review outlining the asymmetrical impacts of both anthropogenic climate change and nuclear winter on agriculture yields.

2) Viewing international trade as a weighted directed network, where nodes are countries and edges are the weighted net export of each considered crop between partners.

3) Evaluating the Louvain community detection method, used in a prior paper, with respect to standard normal p-values generated from the Logrank test statistic to more rigorously discuss which spatial implications of nuclear winter on country trade communities are meaningful.

4) Constructing a score function that considers the severity and difficulty of post-disaster trade transitions, food insecurity from production (yields) and imports, and the extent a trade community can satisfy domestic demand alone, to approximate national food vulnerability following a nuclear disaster.

By the end of the fellowship, I generated a 6500-word research paper, including many spatial graphs, tables, and robust quantitative analysis. I hope to continue work until the paper can be published, and the current version of my paper is found below.