The Kleinman Center Welcomes Two New Scholars

The Kleinman Center for Energy Policy at the University of Pennsylvania is pleased to welcome Faculty Fellow Jisung Park and Senior Fellow Benjamin Schmitt. Park and Schmitt will contribute to the center’s growing body of energy policy research and participate in a variety of events and programming.

About Jisung Park. Jisung Park is an assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania, with a primary appointment at the School of Policy and Practice and secondary appointment in Wharton’s Business Economics and Public Policy department.

Park is an environmental and labor economist interested in how environmental factors shape economic opportunity. He researches the effects of climate change on labor and human capital outcomes, the process of adaptation to environmental change, and the implications of climate change for economic inequality.

Prior to his appointment at Penn, he was a visiting assistant professor at the Yale University School of the Environment, where he taught a course on climate change, human health, and economic inequality. He was an assistant professor of public policy at the University of California, where he served as the director of the Climate Adaptation and Equity Initiative.

Park earned a Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University and two master’s degrees in environmental change and management and development economics from Oxford University.

About Benjamin Schmitt. Benjamin Schmitt is a joint senior fellow at the Kleinman Center and the physics department at the School of Arts and Sciences. He previously was a postdoctoral research fellow and project development scientist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics where he focuses on the development of instrumentation and infrastructure for next-generation Antarctic experimental cosmology facilities at the South Pole, including work with both the BICEP Array and CMB-S4 programs.

Schmitt is the co-founder of the Space Diplomacy Lab at the Duke University Center for International and Global Studies (DUCIGS) and a fellow of the Rethinking Diplomacy program. As a senior fellow for democratic resilience at the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA), he focuses on transatlantic energy and national security analysis, as well as emerging space security challenges to the transatlantic community.

He has served as European energy security advisor at the U.S. Department of State where he advanced diplomatic engagement vital to the energy and national security, with a focus on supporting the resilience of NATO’s eastern flank as it faced Russian malign energy activities.

Before entering government, Schmitt served as a NASA space technology research fellow while pursuing doctoral research at the University of Pennsylvania.  His dissertation research focused on the development of next-generation millimeter-wavelength imaging technologies for the temperature and polarization mapping of the CMB from the Atacama Desert of Northern Chile. For this work, he received master’s and Ph.D. degrees in experimental physics from the University of Pennsylvania.

Schmitt also earned his bachelor’s degree at Penn in physics and astronomy. He holds a bachelor’s degree in both mathematics and modern German languages and cultures from the University of Rochester.