Environment and Sustainability

The Environment and Sustainability Research Cluster aims to facilitate, cultivate, and produce multi-disciplinary, collaborative, and innovative research focused on sustainable environment, urban sustainability and smart cities, and social resilience. It brings together scholars from the disciplines of Economics, Sociology, Psychology, and Public Policy in an effort to critically inform public debate and seek solutions to the challenges posed by climate changes, urbanisation, natural hazards, man-made disasters (e.g., terrorism, wars), and transboundary crises (e.g., financial crisis, epidemics, cyber warfare). It strives to advance knowledge on how sustainability can be pursued over the long term on national, regional, and global levels as well as promote sustainable development practices. It also strives to enhance the capacity of individuals and communities to cope with challenges and bounce back after a challenging condition or traumatic experience.

The Cluster aims to facilitate interdisciplinary dialogue and collaborations across the university through informal gatherings, workshops, formal seminars and conferences, submission of joint external grant proposals, and having joint publications. Besides, it aims to establish a strong research network with local and foreign universities, research centres, and policy groups through seminars, conferences, and research collaborations. Also, it aims to mobilise citizens to become important agents of change in sustainable development and promote the well-being of communities in times of adversity through communications and outreach activities. These activities include newsletters, webinars, awareness events (e.g., public forum), school presentations, public talks, and exhibitions. It is expected that the work of the Cluster can support policymakers and practitioners to make evidence-based decisions for promoting sustainable development and enhancing social resilience as well as engage citizens in adopting good practices for sustainable development.

Cluster Coordinator
Asst. Prof Tang Cheng Keat (Economics)	Cheng Keat is an applied microeconomist and his research interests include Urban and Housing Economics, Transportation Economics, Environmental Economics, and Economics of Crime. Specifically, his research focuses on quantifying the externalities of driving, measuring the cost of climate change, valuing non-market amenities using revealed preference framework, understanding how neighbourhood quality can influence various socio-economic outcomes, and conducting policy evaluations intended to minimise negative externalities in cities (e.g congestion, crime, pollution etc).
Asst. Prof Yan Jubo (Economics)	Jubo’s research interests include behavioural economics, experimental economics, and applied microeconomics. Currently, his research focuses on 1) The impact of behavioural factors (e.g., loss aversion, salience, and social preference) on individuals’ responses to public policies; 2) The role of motivated reasoning in individual and group decision making; 3) Policy evaluation in a development context (e.g., human resource allocation and environmental issues).
Cluster Members
Asst. Prof Akshar Saxena (Economics)	Akshar’s research focuses on health economics and public economics. He works on the interactions between individual’s health and labour decisions, and government’s policies on sin-taxes, healthcare financing, and social security. Within the environment and sustainability sphere, he is working on the link between economic activity, air-pollution, and health and labour outcomes and the sustainability of food and agricultural policies in relation to providing adequate nutrition in developing countries.
Assoc. Prof Chia Wai Mun (Economics)	Wai Mun's areas of interest include international macroeconomics and cost-benefit analysis. Her current research focuses on the effects of real and nominal shocks in a small open economy under different exchange rate regimes, valuation of nonmarket goods through stated preference approach, and estimation of value of a statistical life.
Lecturer Dr. Felix Tan (PPGA)	Felix's research interests include Comparative Politics; Theories of International Relations; Southeast Asian History, Politics and Governance.
Assoc. Prof James Ang (Economics)	James's research has concentrated on how regions and countries can accelerate growth. It includes topics on innovative production, productivity trends, international diffusion of knowledge, human capital, quality of education, institutions, income inequality, financial development and liberalisation, savings and investment, environmental pollution, and macroeconomic stability.
Assoc. Prof Md Saidul Islam (Sociology)	Within the two broad fields of his specialisation, environmental sociology and international development, Saidul is particularly known for his research on food and global aquaculture. His scholarship and interests also span in other substantive yet related areas such as neoliberal globalisation, sustainability, gender and labour, social power, environmentalism, climate change, disaster vulnerabilities, social and environmental justice, and religion and human rights.
Assoc. Prof Michael David Gumert (Psychology)	Michael’s educational background lies in animal behaviour, environmental science, and psychology, and his area of specialisation is primatology. His research focuses on long-tailed macaques (Macaca fascicularis), the common monkey of Southeast Asia, and he was lead editor of the book, Monkeys on the Edge (2011, CUP). His most recognised work is on tool use in wild Burmese long-tailed macaques of Myanmar and southern Thailand, while he has also studied macaque social behaviour in Kalimantan and addressed population and management issues in Singapore with NParks and other organisations. Currently, he is co-developing an international collaboration for region-wide population level studies of M. fascicularis. Lastly, he dabbles in conservation psychology and evolutionary psychology research - particularly, with his NTU students.
Prof Nattavudh Powdthavee (Economics)	Nick's research interests include the economics of mental health and well-being; behavioural economics; fairness; AI and human interaction; climate change and sustainability.
Asst. Prof Nurul Amillin Hussain (Sociology)	Nurul Amillin's research interests include sustainability, renewable energy transitions, climate change and climate change projections, and human-technology interactions in smart cities.
Asst. Prof Paul Victor Patinadan (Psychology)	Paul Victor specialises in health research. He holds appointments as a Health Professions Educator with the National Healthcare Group, a Clinical Teacher at the Lee Kong Chian School of Medicine, and is also an Association for Death Education and Counselling (ADEC) certified Thanatologist. As an interdisciplinary mixed-methods researcher, Paul Victor specialises in psychosocial interventions, positive psychology and wellbeing, implementation science, holistic education in care-ecosystems, and how the medical humanities are employed for humanistic pedagogy. He has worked on projects with a focus on grief and bereavement, community and critical health psychology, psychosociospiritual wellbeing for patients and their families, and evaluative research for health organisations.
Prof Quah Teong Ewe, Euston (Economics)	Euston's areas of expertise are Environmental Economics, Resource Allocation and Cost-Benefit Analysis, Law and Economics and Household Economics. He advises the Singapore Government in various ministries and was a Member of the Prime Minister’s Economic Strategies Sub-Committee on Energy and the Environment.
Assoc. Prof Sulfikar Amir (Sociology)	Sulfikar Amir's research interests primarily focus on examining institutional, political, and epistemological dimensions of scientific knowledge and technological systems. He has conducted research on technological nationalism, development and globalisation, nuclear politics, risk and disaster, design studies, city and infrastructure, and resilience.
Lecturer Dr. Swati Sharma (Economics)	Swati contributes towards teaching the ICC course on sustainability. She is an interdisciplinary researcher, and her research lies at the intersection of economics, clean energy, and sustainability. The present focus of her research is to understand human behaviour and decision-making in the domains of clean energy, climate change, and sustainability by mainly using tools from economics. Her work also focuses on understanding crucial determinants of climate change policy, global agreement adoption, and sustainable development goals.
Assoc. Prof Wang Jue (PPGA)	Jue’s research interests lie in the field of research and innovation policy, particularly government-university-industry interaction, knowledge production, technology commercialisation and entrepreneurial activities.
Asst. Prof Wang Wenjie (Economics)	Wenjie's research interests include Econometric Theory, Machine Learning, Policy Evaluation, and Behavioural Economics. Recently, he is working on research topics such as high-dimensional instrumental variables (IV) models with possibly weak instruments, cluster-robust bootstrap inference for IV quantile regressions, and spatial/network-dependence robust inference methods for high-dimensional models. He is also working on the empirical application of machine learning and network analysis to healthcare and environment issues.
Asst. Prof Ye Guangzhi (Economics)	Guangzhi specialises in macroeconomics and finance. His research focuses on the interactions between firms' investment and financing behaviours, as well as the aggregate impacts of the growing importance of intangible capital. He also examines the macroeconomic implications of environmental policies, uses firm-level data to explore how firms respond to various types of shocks, including monetary policy, financial, supply chain, and climate-related shocks. Additionally, he investigates the international spillover effects of these policies and shocks.
Assoc. Prof Ye Junjia (Sociology)	Junjia's research interests include labour migration, diversification and urbanisation. She uses qualitative methods in her work, including visual methods through film and photography.
Asst. Prof Yeow Hwee Chua (Economics)	Yeow Hwee is the Deputy Director of the Economic Growth Centre at NTU and the Assistant Honorary Secretary of the Economics Society of Singapore. His research interests lie in the intersection of macroeconomics and finance, with a focus on topics in household finance, sustainable finance, behavioural macroeconomics, and monetary economics.
Asst. Prof Zeng Yiwen (Environment & Society)	Yiwen holds a joint appointment in the Asian School of Environment (ASE) and the School of Social Sciences (SSS). Trained as an applied ecologist and geospatial modeller, Yiwen has worked on a diverse range of topics, but is particularly focused on finding ways to deal with the twin crises of climate change and biodiversity loss. Examples of recent topics he has worked on include the potential and limits of market-based mechanisms to fund conservation interventions, as well as the conservation potential of various land-management strategies. His work spans terrestrial and coastal ecosystems and is typically focused on the Asia-Pacific region.