REAL’s Research Assistants come primarily from the Departments of Geography, Economics, Agricultural and Consumer Economics and Urban and Regional Planning, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Previous Students at REAL
Andre Fernandes Tomon Avelino
Ph.D., Agricultural and Applied Economics
Period in REAL: Jan 2010 – Jun 2010 (Undergraduate), Aug 2011 – Jul 2018 (PhD), Aug 2018 – May 2019
E-mail: fernan17@illinois.edu
Website: https://sites.google.com/view/andreavelino
Andre is a Regional Economist with an interdisciplinary focus on human-environmental topics. His research encompasses environmental issues, economics of natural disasters and analysis of structural change. He is specialized in input-output analysis, regional econometric input-output models, spatial econometrics and integrated economic-environmental systems.
Haozhi Pan
Ph.D., Urban and Regional Planning
Period in REAL: Aug 2017 – Sep 2019
E-mail: hpan8@illinois.edu
Pan is a postdoctoral researcher at REAL. He is interested in using high-performance computing technologies to improve spatiotemporal models and solve the mysteries in complex urban systems.
John Julian Patrick Wade
Ph.D. Student – Department of Economics
Period in REAL: Jun 2018 – Jul 2019
E-mail: jjpwade2@illinois.edu
Julian is a PhD student in the department of Economics. He completed his B.S. in Economics with minors in Mathematics and Statistics at the University of Wyoming. His research interests are in International Financial Economics. Julian has international policy oriented career goals.
Maria Gerveni
M.S. Student – Department of Agricultural & Consumer Economics
Period in REAL: Aug 2017 – Jun 2019
E-mail: gerveni2@illinois.edu
Maria Gerveni is currently an MS student in the department of Agricultural and Consumer Economics at UIUC. She holds a bachelor’s degree in Economics and Regional Development from Panteion University in Athens, Greece. Her main research interests lie in Regional Economics, Spatial Econometrics, Environmental Economics and Development.
Sergio Andres Contreras Pinto
Ph.D. Student – Department of Urban and Regional Planning
Period in REAL: Aug 2014 – May 2020
E-mail: scontre2@illinois.edu
Sergio’s research interests focus on Regional Economics, in particular, microenterprises performance evaluation and policy implementation. He also is interested in the role of e-business as a tool for regional growth and inequality reduction. Sergio Contreras holds an MBA from Loyola University Chicago and a B.S. in Management from the University Catholic of the North, Chile.
Yi Huang
Ph.D. Student – Department of Economics
Period in REAL: Jun 2018 – May 2020
E-mail: yihuang4@illinois.edu
I hold a BA in Economics and a MA in Economics from University of British Columbia. My current research focus on housing price dynamics. I am interested in urban economics and environmental economics. I am also interested in behavioral economics.
Yizhou Zhang
Ph.D. Student – Department of Agricultural & Consumer Economics
Period in REAL: Jan 2013 – Jun 2019
E-mail: yzhng114@illinois.edu
My major research field is using Computational General Equilibrium (CGE) models to simulate and evaluate changes in regional economies. In addition, I am interested in labor economics especially the topic of human capital, as well as the application of spatial analytical techniques such as GIS on different regional science research.
Zhangliang Chen
Ph.D. Student – Department of Agricultural & Consumer Economics
Period in REAL: Jun 2015 – Jul 2019
E-mail: zchen105@illinois.edu
My research interest include climate change economics and spatial econometrics. I am recently working on assessing the economic impacts of climate change on U.S. agriculture.