Assistant Professor Patel is the Institute at Brown for Environment and Society’s first faculty member to be jointly appointed in the Department of Economics.
Dev Patel joins Brown following a Prize Fellowship in Economics, History, and Politics at Harvard — where he earned his PhD in 2024 — and a postdoctoral appointment at the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) at MIT.
Conducting research at the intersection of environmental and economic systems, Patel’s core focus areas include environmental issues in low- and middle-income countries, climate adaptation, nature-based solutions, remote sensing, and weather insurance.
Tackling the environmental challenges facing the world today demands drawing insights from across fields, and I very much look forward to collaborating with colleagues and students across Brown to turn that knowledge into actionable, equitable solutions.
Patel is currently engaged in a variety of hands-on, international research projects. In Freetown, Sierra Leone, he has worked with the Mayor’s Office and City Council to study the socio-economic and climate impacts of their large-scale “Freetown the Treetown” tree planting initiative. With a grant from Stanford Impact Labs, Patel and colleagues at Stanford and Harvard have also formed a research partnership with the Indian Government of Odisha to investigate the region’s landmark weather insurance policy. The study, now in its third year, has started to shed light on climate resilience in rural India.
“Dev brings a remarkably diverse toolkit to IBES, one designed to connect the dots between climate and environmental impacts and economic risks and opportunities on scales relevant to the policymaking process,” said IBES Director Kim Cobb.
As he completes summertime fieldwork abroad, Patel noted that he is “incredibly thrilled” to join IBES’ rich, interdisciplinary community beginning on July 1.
Welcome, Professor Patel!