Judy Geyer

Fall 2007: D. Epple, H. Sieg, and I are presenting "Meeting the Challenges of Public Housing Policies in a Large Metropolitan Area" at the Urban Economics session of the North American Meeting of the RSAI in November.

Summer 2007: I attended the public economics sessions of the NBER Summer Institute and G. Imbens and J. Wooldridge's "What's New in Econometrics" NBER Course

Spring 2007: I passed qualifying exams and will be receiving a master's degree in economics. Now I'm settling in to the best part of grad school- more to appear here soon...

Fall 2006: All confidence gained since age 13 quickly withers away as qualifying exams approach...

Summer 2006: I am attending the Institute on Computational Economics.

Fall 2005: As I settle in to graduate school, I will post more about my current work on economics and public policy. For now, what follows is a synopsis of previous endeavors.

I've spent most of the last eight years trying to live the life of the characters on the old PBS kids show "Three Two One Contact". Every episode, those kids were exploring a new scientific question and their laboratories ranged from ocean schooners to archeological sites. I'm still jealous.

So, here's how the "Three Two One Contact" theme played out in my life so far, in reverse chronological order. The pictures are not my own and are not necessarily true representations of items I worked with/on.

	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 and learned a lot about public transportation departments. 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. Oh well.
	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.
	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.

Degrees, identities:
-MSE '02, University of Pennsylvania;
-BSE '02, University of Pennsylvania;
-Westwood High School, MA;
-born Judy Evans.