2021 Paul Volcker Symposium In Behavioral Economics
Panel Discussion

Tuesday, March 30, 2021

A virtual event via zoom. 


Symposium Speakers

Shaz Attari Shahzeen Attari
Indiana University

"Perceptions of Energy use and Systems"

Shahzeen Attari’s research focuses on people's judgments and decisions about climate change and resource use. Some of her research has investigated how people think about energy and water use, how people conceptualize water systems, and how the carbon footprint of climate communicators affects their audience’s policy support. Among other projects, she is currently studying how to use stories to fuse facts and feelings to motivate action on climate change. She is an Associate Professor at the O’Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs (SPEA) at Indiana University Bloomington. 



Alex MakiAlex Maki
U.S. Food and Drug Administration 

"Do as I Say AND as I Do: Multiple Pathways from Interpersonal Influence to Environmental Action"

Alex Maki received his PhD in Social Psychology from the University of Minnesota in 2015, where his research used theory-based interventions to understand and influence environmental, health, and prosocial behaviors. Afterwards, Alex was a Postdoctoral Fellow with the Vanderbilt Institute for Energy and Environment, where he examined how people perceive environmental policies and how to help people have constructive conversations about environmental issues. Most recently, he was a Science Policy Fellow exploring climate and energy policy, first in the U.S. Senate, then at the U.S. Department of Energy. He just started as a Social Scientist with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.



Lisa Zaval Lisa Zaval
Columbia University

"Leveraging Legacy to Drive Sustainable Decision Making"

Lisa Zaval holds a PhD in Psychology from Columbia University’s Center for Research on Environmental Decisions, and completed post-doctoral training at Columbia Business School.  One area of her research investigates choice architecture related to pro-environmental decision making -- investigating how features of the decision context influence sustainable attitudes and behaviors. In addition to her appointment as a research scientist at Columbia, Lisa is an applied behavioral scientist at Irrational Labs and the See Change Institute. She also serves as a research advisor to a number of organizations, including projects with the United Nations, The City of New York, Pacific Gas and Electric, and Oracle.



For more information please contact Katrina Fiacchi at kfiacchi@syr.edu or 315.443.9040.


Past Symposium Speakers

2019 - April 9. Alix Barasch (New York University), Syon Bhanot (Swarthmore College), Sandra Goff (Skidmore College), and Sandra Polania-Reyes (Notre Dame)

2018 - March 26. Emiliano Huet-Vaughn (UCLA), Adam Levine (Cornell University), and Andrea Robbett (Middlebury University)

2017 - April 28. Tatiana Homonoff (NYU), Jacob Goldin (Stanford University), and Joseph Boskovski (Syracuse University, Maxwell X Lab)