Lorie Srivastava has a Ph.D. in Environmental and Natural Resource Economics, from Michigan State University. She also has a M.A. in Economics, a M.Sc. in Agricultural Economics, a B.A. in Economics, and a B.C.Sc. (Honours) in Computer Science. After completing her Computer Science degree, Lorie designed and developed e-courseware covering financial topics for small/medium businesses. For her Master’s degree in Agricultural Economics, she conducted primary research in the Middle Mountains of Nepal, examining and modelling farmers’ choices to grow vegetable cash crops for nearby markets. After completing her Ph.D., Lorie worked as a non-partisan researcher for Parliament of Canada, has worked in academia, private sector, government, and public agencies. Lorie is keenly interested in estimating the economic value of natural assets, such as water sources and forests and how they are affected by climate change. She would like to leverage her computer skills and apply virtual reality and artificial intelligence technologies in assessing people’s preferences and the economic values they place on market and non-market goods and services – i.e. goods and services such as clean air that are not traded in regular markets. Lorie has returned to academia and is currently a Post-Doctoral Fellow at UC Davis; in this capacity, she is estimating the economic value of various ecosystem services – water, air quality, sediment retention, and sequestered carbon – generated by the National Forests in southern California, and how climate change will affect these values. These areas are dominated by chaparral, prone to wildfires, and drought. Lorie is Canadian, splitting her time between Davis, CA and Vancouver, BC.