Samira Barzin, PhD

I am a quantitative and computational economist who is particularly passionate about all things economic development, in particular cities and environmental factors in developing countries. For my work I rely heavily on combinations of spatial and big data, econometrics and machine learning.

I am an Oxford Martin Fellow within the Informal Cities programme of the Oxford Martin School and a Research Associate at the Mathematical Institute at the University of Oxford. I also work as an consultant with the World Bank's Global Facility for Disaster Reduction and Recovery.

Previously, I was an Assistant Professor in Economic Geography at the University of Groningen/Netherlands. I hold a PhD in Civil Engineering from Imperial College London and a MSc in Economics from the London School of Economics and Political Science.

My primary research focuses on topics at the nexus of  Development Economics, Spatial/Urban Economics, and Environmental Economics. Overall, I am particularly interested in cities of Sub-Saharan Africa and the burden of climate change and environmental/climate change parameters on developing countries and people living in poverty. Methodologically, I am very invested in merging traditional econometrics approaches for causality analyses and machine learning algorithm for prediction investigations. For my work, I am passionate about merging and combining various data from satellite derived data for both computer vision and atmospheric data,  geocoded survey data, API queried and webscraped data. I am also very engaged in data visualisations to make my work more accessible to the avid reader through optical information.

Research Fields: 

Development Economics, Spatial/Urban Economics, Environmental & Climate Change Economics 

Methodological Fields:

Big Spatial Data, (Spatial) Econometrics, Machine Learning, Satellite Data, Coding