People

The Nicholas Institute

Before joining the Nicholas Institute, Kay worked as an environmental attorney with the Southern Environmental Law Center and the University of Denver’s Environmental Law Clinic. She is pursuing her doctorate in political and environmental sociology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

She holds a J.D. with a concentration in environmental law from Tulane University Law School, a master’s degree in environmental health sciences from the Tulane University School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine, and a bachelor’s degree in anthropology from the University of South Carolina.

Duke Department of Economics

Christopher D. Timmins is a Professor in the Department of Economics at Duke University, with a secondary appointment in Duke’s Nicholas School of the Environment. He holds a BSFS degree from Georgetown University and a PhD in Economics from Stanford University. Professor Timmins was an Assistant Professor in the Yale Department of Economics before joining the faculty at Duke in 2004. His professional activities include teaching, research, and editorial responsibilities. Professor Timmins specializes in natural resource and environmental economics, but he also has interests in industrial organization, development, public and regional economics. He works on developing new methods for non-market valuation of local public goods and amenities, with a particular focus on hedonic techniques and models of residential sorting. His recent research has focused on measuring the costs associated with exposure to poor air quality, the benefits associated with remediating brownfields and toxic waste under the Superfund program, the valuation of non-marginal changes in disamenities, and the causes and consequences of “environmental injustice”. He has also recently begun a new research agenda on the social costs of hydraulic fracturing for the extraction of natural gas.Professor Timmins is a research associate in the Environmental and Energy Economics group at the National Bureau of Economic Research, and has served as a reviewer for numerous environmental, urban, and applied microeconomics journals. He currently serves on the editorial board of the American Economic Review and is a co-editor of the Journal of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists.