Judy Geyer

Other

Previous Life

I did not arrive in an economics phd program by taking the traditional route. My research and work experiences in psychology, computer science, and epidemiology afford me a unique perspective to identify areas where economists can contribute to our understanding of the social world.

I began my career in the "Computer and Cognitive Science" program at the University of Pennsylvania. Fortunately I was a member of Penn's University Scholars program, which encouraged and helped me to get involved in a wide variety of research projects. In trying to define "cognitive", I explored research on brain injury, negotiation behavior, and vision processing. In trying to explore what computer scientists do, I performed research in machine learning and knowledge representations.

After graduating with a bachelor's and master's degree in engineering, I felt something was missing from my toolkit: statistics. So I got a job working on credit decision software, followed by a job where I plotted how to automate the detection of usually higher liability probabilities (injury collisions on highways).

I was introduced to economics while researching injury trends at the UC Berkeley School of Public Health. Of all of the research I drew on, I was most intrigued by form of inquiry used by economists modeling the adoption of injury-causing material goods. After taking a couple of courses in economics and real analysis at Berkeley, I was eager to join an economics phd program.

Below is an abbreviated, and hopefully entertaining, summary of my true (not just course-based) education. The summary is presented in reverse chronological order.

	Traffic Safety Center, School of Public Health, University of California, Berkeley At the TSC I worked on projects ranging from high collision concentration analysis to protocols for seat belt use studies. I also wrote grants; in 2004 I was the primary author on four independent proposals that together awarded the TSC with 84\% of its previous year's operating budget. Geyer, J., Raford, N., Ragland, D., Pham, T. The continuing debate about safety in numbers: Data from Oakland, CA. Proceedings of the 85th Annual Transportation Research Board Meeting, January 2006. MacLeod, M., Geyer, J., Satariano, W., Ragland D. Association between health problems and driver status among older adults. Proceedings of the 84th Annual Transportation Research Board Meeting, January 2005. Johnson, E., Geyer, J., Rai, N., Ragland, D. Childhood pedestrian injury in low-income families: understanding the disparate risk. Proceedings of the 84th Annual Transportation Research Board Meeting, January 2005\ . Geyer, J., Ragland, D. Vehicle Occupancy and Crash Risk. Proceedings of the 84th Annual Transportation Research Board Meeting, January 2005. Brown, T., Geyer, J., Mitchell, B., Taghavy, A., Ragland, D. "Pre-hospital care of road traffic injuries in Chiang Mai, Thailand" Proceedings of the 84th Annual Transportation Research Board Meeting, January 2005. Bechtel, A., Geyer, J., Ragland, D. "A review of ITS-based pedestrian injury countermeasures", with Allison Bechtel and David Ragland, Proceedings of the 83rd Annual Transportation Research Board Meeting, January 2004.
	Software Product Consultant, Provenir For a brief period after college, I worked on-site for a software vendor to configure credit-analysis software for banks.
	Master's Degree Research, GRASP Laboratory, University of Pennsylvania Skeptical about the application of reinforcement learning alrogithms in large, noisy state spaces, I did some experiments with a Sony AIBO robot. To add (too much) noise, the robot's task was to both perform and evaluate (using sensory perception) a few "moves" with a soccer ball. It was a fun experience, and I learned a lot about Penn's RoboCup team. And being at a university I was able to program the AIBO to do whatever I wanted without violating the Digital Millenium Copyright Act. Hmpf.
	Summer Internship, Artificial Intellgience Software, Lockheed Martin At ATL I worked on a knowledge representation for onboard damage analysis and compensation by unmanned aerial vehicles.
	Summer Intern, Software Development, Lucent Technology Software Products Group One summer I helped to develop GUI internationalization standards for billing software. The major issue is formating text spaces to allow sufficient room for translated words, keeping in mind that some languages read right-to-left, up-down, etc. Here's an interesting, albeit old, article about this work.
	Undergrad Psychology Research in Negotiation, University of Pennsylvania Advised by Dr. Jonathan Baron, I studied why people hold a "fixed pie assumption" in negotiation. For test subjects, I invited internet-users to interact with a dynamic, online negotiation task that I had developed. Funding was provided from Penn's University Scholars program. Evans, J. Failure to use information to reach integrative outcomes in negotiation. Perspectives in Psychology: The Undergraduate Psychology Journal of the University of Pennsylvania, Volume 4, 2001.
	Undergrad Psychology Research in Behavioral Learning, University of Pennsylvania In Dr. Robert Rescorla's class my class mates and I tried to see if we could train rats to press levers to obtain a food pellet. Then we tried to see if the presence of a learned rat helped a novice rat learn the same task. This second inquiry isn't really a behavioral learning task, though.
	Undergrad Psychology Research in Vision Processing, University of Pennsylvania In Dr. Edward Pugh's class, my classmates and I hooked each other up to EEGs, looked at flashing red lights, and then spent a good hour scrubbing our hair clean of that electrode goo. Moreover, we used FFT to analyze the speed at which the brain was processing the flashing lights.
	Undergraduate Research, University of Pennsylvania Medical School My first college "research experience" was in a lab at the Penn medical school. All I remember is pipetting things, watching live animals experience brain trauma in a controlled setting, and deciding that "wet" science wasn't for me.
	Summer Intern, Quality Assurance, Intertech Engineering Associates The summer after high school I evaluated medical infusion pumps for quality assurance related to FDA regulations. We didn't actually have needles, just the tube & plunger.