Tuesday, December 24, 2013

My Year in Review 2013

This was a year of further consolidation and was less eventful academically than 2012, which I also reported was more of a following through on things planned in 2011. It certainly wasn't boring though! And there is plenty to report.

This was my second and final year as research director at Crawford. Renée McKibbin will be taking over from me in 2014. One success this year was getting Megan Poore hired on a continuing contract as HDR (higher degree by research = PhD) academic skills adviser. She continues to do an amazing job working with PhD students in the School. Also our annual PhD Conference was the biggest and best ever, with more than 200 registrations. Megan guides the PhD students in organizing the conference. Coinciding with the end of my term as research director, Robyn Walter, our HDR administrator, will be retiring. As I also wrote last year, Robyn has done a fantastic job of keeping everything running smoothly in this space at the Crawford School (we have about 120 PhD students), dealing with all aspects of student applications, scholarships, milestones etc. I really appreciated having such an experienced staff member to help me through these two years in my role, which made my life so much easier than it might have been.

Canberra in Google Earth 3D Building View

I formally published two journal articles this year. One was the paper on standard errors for journal impact factors published in the Journal of Economic Literature. The other was the paper on Granger causality in the long-run energy GDP dataset for Sweden coauthored with Kerstin Enflo and published in Energy Economics. I also published a very short book chapter. I do also have a paper published already in a 2014 issue of Climatic Change and we have another paper in press at the Energy Journal. We also have a couple of papers under review. So, already there is a good chance of publishing more papers in 2014 than in 2013. And of course the Working Group 3 contribution to the IPCC 5th Assessment Report will be out in 2014 and there will a couple more book chapter style pieces.

Work continued on the research funded by the ARC grant we were awarded in 2011. We hired Yingying Lu as a postdoc to work on CGE modelling with the G-Cubed model. Following Astrid Kander's visit to Canberra last year, in September I visited Lund for two weeks. As this grant will end in early 2015, it's now time to apply to the ARC for another grant. Zsuzsanna Csereklyei will be visiting Canberra in January and February and working with me on developing a proposal focusing on energy efficiency. We've also been working on a paper that hopefully we can soon put out as a working paper.

I gave presentations at two conferences - one was the First International Workshop on Econometric Applications in Climatology in Guelph. The other was the ANZSEE meeting here in Canberra. Actually here in the Crawford Building, which is why I didn't write that I went to two conferences :) Besides those, the only non-teaching presentation I gave was to a visiting delegation from the Ho Chi Minh National Academy of Politics and Public Administration about research assessment.

I attended my last IPCC meeting of this assessment cycle, this time in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. This was my first trip to Africa south of the Sahara. I also visited Kenya after the meeting in Ethiopia. Spain and Israel also featured in the trip and there were plane changes in Germany, Turkey, and Abu Dhabi as well...

On the teaching front, I taught the Energy Economics course for the second time - in the second semester. Chris Short, Hugh Saddler, and Paul Burke were again guest lecturers. I also again taught an introductory microeconomics course - Economic Way of Thinking I and I again gave a series of three lectures in our flagship CRWF 8000 course in the first semester.

My most popular blogpost that I wrote this year was one on my paper on uncertainty in journal impact factors. Of course, that was near the beginning of the year and so has had plenty of time to accumulate hits...

Some things lined up for 2014, which I haven't already mentioned above, include:
  • Both Yingying and I and many other of our colleagues will be at the AARES meeting in Port Macquarie in early February. Yingying will present a paper on the first results from our CGE research. I am supposed to talk about "Rethinking the Emissions-Income Relationship in Terms of Growth Rates".
  • There will be another research trip to Sweden as required by the terms of our grant.
  • Astrid Kander will be visiting Sydney in February to collaborate with researchers at UNSW on embodied emissions in trade. This work emerged from discussion at the seminar she gave when she visited ANU in 2012. Jack Pezzey and I plan to meet with her there to work on our next paper in preparation for a presentation he will give at the Economic History Society meeting in the UK.
  • Then there are a bunch of conferences in mid-year that we plan to submit abstracts to. The biggest is the World Congress of Environmental Economics in Istanbul. In 2013 I didn't get out of the airport in Istanbul, so 2014 will hopefully present progress on that front :)
  • The deadline for the special issue of Energies on "Energy Transitions and Economic Change" will be in July and we hope to get the first articles online during 2014.
  • I should be more involved with the ANU Energy Change Institute this year. I will be serving on the executive committee and assisting in convening the Masters of Energy Change from the social science side.
  • I'm also hoping to increase my pace of research after completing my term as research director and maybe even write more posts on this blog than this year.
Granada, Spain (and me)

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