Elinor Benami is an Assitant Professor in Virginia Tech’s Agricultural and Applied Economics Department. Prior to this, she was a Postdoctoral Scholar with the Feed the Future Innovation Lab on Markets, Risk, and Resilience (MRR) centered at the Agricultural and Resource Economics Department of UC Davis and received her Ph.D. from the Emmett Interdisciplinary Program in Environment and Resources (E-IPER) at Stanford University. Drawing upon methods and theories from economics and land system science, her research employs qualitative and quantitative approaches to address how digital data can help predict, detect, and remedy environmental hazards that affect human welfare. She received her bachelor’s degree in Economics from UNC-Chapel Hill in 2010, where she was a Udall Scholar and Eve Marie Carson Scholar. She then moved to Climate Policy Initiative to work on policy and finance related to renewable energy in the US and economic development in the global tropics. At Stanford, she was an NSF Graduate Research Fellow and selected for the Rising Environmental Leadership Program. She’s also a licensed amateur radio operator (call sign K6NMI).