Rachel M. Young is an Assistant Professor at the Humphrey School of Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. She joined the University of Minnesota after serving as a Ciriacy-Wantrup Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics at the University of California, Berkeley, and as a Visiting Postdoctoral Scholar at Stanford University’s Global Policy Lab.
She received her PhD in Science, Technology, and Environmental Policy from the School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University and holds a Master of Public Policy from the Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley. During her doctoral training, she was an Associate Doctoral Fellow at the Global Policy Lab at UC Berkeley and a Research Volunteer with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Office of Policy Development and Research. She also worked at the White House Council on Environmental Quality, where she advised the Biden Administration on federal flood mitigation, disaster response, and insurance policy.
Rachel is an environmental economist whose research examines how climate and environmental hazards shape population dynamics, including migration, mortality, and housing outcomes, with an emphasis on spatial inequality and adaptation. She uses large-scale administrative, demographic, and spatial data to study population–environment interactions and to evaluate the effectiveness of climate adaptation and disaster response policies.