Ph.D Graduate Profile

SLARIA LANDS TENURE-TRACK POSITION AT ILLINOIS STATE

Srishti Slaria, a specialist in energy and environmental economics, will be joining the faculty at Illinois State University in the fall of 2024.

Slaria Lands Tenure-Track Position at Illinois State

The KU Economics Department is pleased to announce that Srishti Slaria, who specializes in energy, environmental and resource economics, has accepted a tenure-track Assistant Professor of Economics position at Illinois State University this fall.  Srishti, who will be receiving her PhD in May, served last summer as a special intern at the prestigious Resources for the Future (RFF).

Her position at Illinois State will focus in the area of energy economics. She is expected to be teaching principles of microeconomics in addition to energy and environmental economics-focused courses at the undergraduate level; and at the master’s level, courses for a specialized ISU applied economics track (Electricity, Natural Gas, and Telecommunications).

Srishti, who received her undergraduate degree from Eastern Illinois University (economics and psychology) in 2019, said that she was already familiar with Illinois State and the surrounding area when she interviewed, since ISU and EIU were collegiate sports rivals and she had played tennis against the (ISU) Redbirds as an undergraduate student athlete.

She added that she had very much enjoyed her five years at KU (which included receiving her master’s in economics in 2020), notwithstanding many of the challenges associated with the pandemic and its impact. 

She explained that those challenges alongside the rigors of the academic program led her to bond with her fellow economics students in pursuit of their doctoral degrees. 

“Our first semester at KU was quite a survival journey, but all of us found time outside of our common office space where we would hang out and try to relax. I say 'try' because we would end up discussing the new terms and theories we learned in the classroom and making jokes using those,” she laughed. “We got together on some weekends and played fun games like "Psych" and "Catch-Phrase"; celebrated birthdays together; and went downtown for ice cream at Sylas and Maddy's. I am glad to have been a part of such a great group that helped me survive my first year at KU.”

As she approaches the finish line here in Lawrence, Srishti said that she has a great many additional fond memories of her days in and around the Department.

“My Ph.D. advisor, Dr. Tsvetan Tsvetanov, has been a great mentor to me; and I would  also like to give a shoutout to Kate Pleskac, the former departmental graduate program coordinator, who was super accommodating and understanding of the needs of all of us graduate students,” she said. 

Her job market paper (100% clean electricity by 2035? The impact of extreme and exceptional drought on hydroelectricity in the Pacific Northwest), presented at a special Economics Department seminar last fall, featured a fascinating look at how the experience of four specific Pacific Northwest states could inform ongoing policy discussions. The research, especially important given the 100 percent clean electricity goal set by the federal government for 2035, seeks to quantify the extent to which highly intense droughts reduce hydroelectricity generation.

 Srishti’s research uses ten years of power plant-level data and county-level measures of drought and finds a 23 percent decrease in generation of an average hydropower plant if an entire county is hit by such droughts. This result, showing the vulnerability of the region’s most abundant clean energy source to high-intensity drought, further suggests substantial additional social costs of increased carbon emissions generated from the replacement of the lost hydropower by fossil fuels. Disaggregating the overall effect to examine heterogeneous impacts indicates that high-intensity droughts negatively impact large capacity plants, run-of-river operations, and summer generation more severely. Comparing two major drought events, 2015 and 2021, suggests that the severity of impact also varies by drought prevalence. Srishti observes that her findings carry important implications for electricity suppliers in the region and policymakers thinking about future hydropower development in light of the 100 percent goal.

Her most recent publication (with Molly Robertson and Karen Palmer) was an interestingRFF report released in September, “Expanding the Possibilities: When and Where Can Grid-Enhancing Technologies, Distributed Energy Resources, and Microgrids Support the Grid of the Future?”