Max Pohlman

Data scientist with a unique combination of economic, environmental, and statistical knowledge and interest.
maxpohlman.com • maxpohlman@gmail.com • 617-755-4947

Education

PhD, Energy, Environmental, and Food Economcs; Pennsylvania State University (2019-2024 expected)

Dissertation title: The Economic Benefits of Forested Riparian Buffers: An Empirical Evaluation

MS, Environmental and Natural Resource Economics; University of Rhode Island (2015-2017)

Thesis title: Effects of Uncertainty and Ambiguity in Coasian Bargaining

BS, Economics; Pennsylvania State University (2011-2015)

Minor: Environmental and Renewable Resource Economics

Experience

Research Assistant Penn State University (2019-2024)

  • Conducted interdisciplinary empirical research evaluating environmental impacts of pollution abatement efforts
  • Estimated monetary benefits, both local and downstream, of cleaner waters due to pollution abatement
  • Analyzed demographic distribution of said economic benefits through an environmental justice lens
  • Estimated recreational demand for cleaner waters
  • Developed an interactive R-Shiny application to show common multi-waterbody trips for boaters, highlighting risk for the spread of invasive species
  • Developed an interactive R-Shiny application for forest land-owners to find carbon credit programs that they qualify for
  • Conducted an economic experiment evaluating boater’s willingness-to-pay for public boat washing stations, and boater’s preference between monetary incentives and environmental improvement incentives
  • Conducted intercept surveys evaluating boater preferences for public boat washing stations

Data Scientist & Lead R-Shiny Developer Mathematica Policy Research (Oct 2017 - Aug 2019)

  • Led development of numerous R-Shiny applications including layout design & CSS, modularization, application algorithm & logic development, web-browser communication, server deployment, package development.

  • Constructed and maintained a diverse suite of data processing pipelines and interactive visualizations using R, Python, Leaflet, JS, Selenium, and more.

Research Assistant University of Rhode Island (Jan 2016 - Aug 2017)

  • Conducted economic experiments and performed analysis of the effects of uncertainty and ambiguity on bargaining behavior. Funded under a NSF EPSCoR grant on The Future of Dams

Sustainability Intern Enel Green Power (Jun-Aug 2016)

  • Built an economic impacts tool that predicted changes in community employment and compensation based on community policy and specifications of company planned wind farms.

Research Assistant Penn State University (Sep 2013 - May 2015)

  • Performed multivariate analysis regarding economic factors and implications of the increase of Marcellus Shale fracking.

Invited Presentations

  • 2023 EPA & Cornell Social Cost of Water Pollution Workshop
  • 2022 Northeast Agricultural and Resource Economics Association (NAREA) Ecosystem Services Workshop
  • 2022 NAREA Annual Meeting
  • 2022 Association of Environmental and Resource Economists (AERE) Annual Meeting
  • 2022 W4133: Costs and Benefits of Natural Resources on Public and Private Lands: Management, Economic Valuation, and Integrated Decision-Making Annual Meeting

Other Skills

  • 12 years experience coding in R, specifically:

    • Cleaning, organizing, transforming data (pkgs ‘tidyverse’)

    • Econometric analysis via causal inference, difference-in-difference, recreation demand, nonmarket valuation, benefit cost analysis, economic experimentation, regression discontinuity

    • Geospatial analysis of vectors, rasters. Construction of interactive maps (pkgs ‘sf’, ‘sp’, ‘rgdal’, ‘rgeos’, ‘leaflet’)

    • Supervised and unsupervised learning via classification, regression, clustering, PCA, text analytics (pkgs ‘caret’, ‘e1071’, ‘quanteda’)

    • Visualization and document construction through ggplot, R-Shiny, R-Markdown

  • Knowledge of git and project management and version control through github

  • Experience in Python, STATA, Markdown, MySQL, Bash, Access, MatLab, HTML, ArcGIS, Qualtrics

  • Construction of stained glass artwork

maxpohlman@gmail.com • 31 years old
2 Saint Paul Street #301 Brookline, MA 02446