Farrow Chief Economist at GAO
Fischbeck Assumes Leadership of CSIR

    On January 11, 2002, Scott Farrow stepped down as Director of Carnegie Mellon's Center for the Study and Improvement of Regulation (CSIR) to become Chief Economist for the General Accounting Office of the U.S. Congress. While EPP will miss Scott greatly, this new position will give him an exciting opportunity to have an important impact on the effectiveness of governance, including health and safety regulation, in the U.S.

    When he announced Scott's departure, Granger Morgan (EPP/ECE/Heinz) noted that "as the founding director of CSIR, Scott has done an outstanding job of creating a strong Center which has conducted much important research and made many valuable contributions to the cause of improving health, safety and environmental regulation. I want to thank Scott for his continuing efforts to make CSIR one of the leading organizations of its kind in the country."

    In explaining Scott's new responsibilities, GAO Comptroller General, David M. Walker wrote "Dr. Farrow will report to me and will be organizationally located in the Applied Research and Methods team. The Chief Economist's responsibilities include providing advice and assistance to me and our team Managing Directors and Directors on major economic issues; working with the economists in ARM's Center for Economics and in the teams to support and invigorate our economic analyses; developing the intellectual capital of our economist staff; and representing GAO to the economics community outside of GAO."

    Prof. Paul Fischbeck (SDS/EPP) has assumed the directorship of CSIR. Much of his research lies squarely in the area of regulation. He served as co-editor with Farrow of the recent RFF Press book Improving Regulation: Cases in environment, health and safety (see page 3). Robert Margolis has joined EPP from the Kennedy School of Government to serve as Executive Director of CSIR.

Vajjhala Receives Award

    During the summer of 2001 Shalini Vajjhala (EPP doctoral student) received a $10,000 fellowship from InformationWeek Magazine and the Carnegie Mellon Software Industry Center to complete research on risk communication and resettlement projects. By combining elicited hand-drawn neighborhood maps with state-of-the-art GIS computer tools, she studied how personalized maps can facilitate risk-related decision making. Based on this work, Shalini gave two presentations, one at the 10th International Rural Sociology Conference in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil and the other at the 11th Annual Information Week Conference in Tucson, AZ.

    Shalini received a BS in architecture and a 5th-year Master's in EPP. She currently is a doctoral student in EPP.

Tsinghua Delegation Visits

    On February 22, 2002, EPP hosted a visit by a six-person delegation from Tsinghua University in Beijing. Led by Tsinghua Vice President for Research, Prof. GONG Ke (in photo with Granger Morgan (EPP/ECE/Heinz), the delegation met with EPP faculty and students, and with Carnegie Mellon President Jared Cohon, to learn about EPP's unique research and degree programs. Tsinghua is well known as China's leading technical university. In recent years, Tsinghua has pursued ambitious plans to become a world-class comprehensive university by opening new schools of law, economics & management, public affairs, and journalism. EPP alum XUE Lan (EPP Ph.D. 1991 and EPP Adjunct Professor) has played a key role in launching Tsinghua's new School of Public Affairs. Other members of Prof. Gong's delegation included Prof. BAI Yongyi, Director of the University Policy Research, Prof. CHEN Hong, Director of International Relations, Prof. LIU Ying, Director of the Office of Academic Degrees, Prof. WANG Jinsong, Head of Academic Affairs, and Prof. WANG Yan, Deputy Director of Science and Technology.

Sun - continued from pg. 6

important sources of individual and population exposure to particulate matter, yielding exposures at least one order of magnitude higher than those from on-road vehicles and power stations. This suggests that exposure-based environmental regulation has significant potential to improve the efficiency of particulate matter management.

    Work supported by the National Science Foundation (SBR-9521914) through the Center for Integrated Study of the Human Dimensions of Global Change, and from Carnegie Mellon.

Strachan - continued from pg. 5

    A static mixed integer linear programming (MILP) optimization model was developed to minimize total costs for meeting the electricity and heat requirements of two U.S. states with different seasonality and HPR characteristics. Aggregation of sectoral loads gave savings over the 15 year time horizon of 7.5% for New York and 11.3% for Florida.

    For social plus private costs, and aggregating sectors in New York state, the optimal distributed cogen solution is 75% of that using conventional supply technologies, and 62% of the solution using conventional coal steam turbines.

    The optimal runs for distributed cogen vs. conventional supply technologies were used to calculate an appropriate capital subsidy for distributed cogen. If social costs are included, the value ranges from $623 - $785 per kW, and if coal fired centralized plants are considered, then the subsidy level rises to around $980 per kW.

    Work supported by the Center for Integrated Study of the Human Dimensions of Global Change by National Science Foundation SBR-9711498 and SBP-9521914.

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