About “Ram Pandit”

Being grown up in a Nepalese village, I have experienced closely the role of forests on subsistence economy, which partly led me to pursue undergraduate study in Forestry Sciences from Tribhuwan University (Institute of Forestry) in Nepal. Upon completion of BSc in 1994, I initially worked as an Agro-ecological Research Site Coordinator at Lumle Agricultural Research Centre, a centre funded by the then ODA of the British Government, for 3 years (1995-1998) and later worked with the Government of Nepal (Department of Forests) as a Forester for 3 years (1998-2001). The Fulbright Scholarship in 2001 took me to the State University of New York, College of Environmental Sciences and Forestry to pursue Master’s degree in Forest Resources Management. As a part of Master’s thesis I conducted a research to examine the impacts of Community Forestry on forest products supply and environmental outcomes among selected community forests in Nepal. A PhD research assistantship offer from Auburn University to work on ‘human dimensions of species fragility’ took me to Auburn in 2003 for an Applied Economics PhD, which I completed in 2007. With the change in focus from forest resource management to applied economics, I studied economics and statistics while pursuing PhD that eventually led me to earn MS in Economics and MS in Probability and Statistics degrees. In my PhD research, I analysed socio-economic determinants of threatened species among countries using spatial econometric techniques. Then prior to joining UWA in 2009, I spent 2 years at Auburn as a Postdoctoral Fellow working on an urban forestry project that examined the economic impact of tree shade on energy consumption in urban homes.