Present
Postdoctoral Researcher, University of Zurich, Department of History
ERC Project “Fair-Weather Finance: Historical Antecedents of Climate Risk Management” (FAIRFI)

2021 – 2026
Doctor of Science in the History and Theory of Architecture, ETH Zurich

2023 – 2024
Lecturer, ETH Zurich, Institute for the History and Theory of Architecture

2018 – 2021
Master of Architecture, Princeton University School of Architecture
Certificate in Media + Modernity

2019 – 2021
Research and Teaching Assistant, Princeton University School of Architecture

2014 – 2018
Bachelor of Arts in Architectural Studies, University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA)
Minor in Russian Literature

History of Technology; Environmental History; History of Risk and Insurance; Infrastructure Studies; Agricultural and Rural History; History of Development; Landscape History; Architectural History

Index-Based Agricultural Insurance and the Problem of Information Asymmetry

This project examines the role of weather knowledge in the history of index-based agricultural insurance (i.e. parametric insurance) and its promise to alleviate the moral hazard of crop risk management. As opposed to traditional indemnity-based insurance schemes that rely on the quantification of damages to return a payment to the insured, index-based insurance triggers payouts based on meteorological indicators associated with adverse growing conditions. To support this new insurance product, finance and risk management institutions began to conduct research on regional weather patterns, microclimates, and units of agricultural property to produce stable “index-yield” relationships for any particular insured crop. This project focuses on the meteorological research of Swiss Re and World Bank in the late twentieth century to examine how their early explorations into index-based insurance sought to establish certain weather conditions as normative and how swings beyond a standard deviation were financialized as a practice of risk management.