Leigh Spears Tesfatsion

Leigh Tesfatsion received the Ph.D. degree in economics, with a minor supporting program in mathematics, from the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, in 1975. She joined the Department of Economics at the University of Southern California in 1975, where she subsequently was promoted to associate and full professor. In 1990 she accepted a position as Professor of Economics at Iowa State University, with a courtesy appointment as Professor of Mathematics. In January 2009 she accepted an additional courtesy appointment as Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering. Her current research focuses on integrated retail and wholesale power market operations with smart grid functionality, reformulation of wholesale power markets for improved handling of uncertainties, and the development of decision support tools for economic decision-making related to water, energy, and climate change issues. This research is based in part on the development and use of test beds constructed by means of an Agent-based Computational Economics (ACE) modeling approach. ACE is the computational study of economic processes (including whole economies) as dynamic virtual worlds of interacting agents. Her past research has focused on: optimality and efficiency issues for open-ended dynamic economies (e.g., endogenous worker-employer matching, financial intermediation, and human capital investment); criterion filtering for learning and decision-making under uncertainty; adaptive computation techniques for automatic differentiation and homotopy continuation; and the development of the Flexible Least Squares (FLS) method as a diagnostic tool for model specification. This research has been reported in over 120 publications in economics, mathematics, statistics, engineering, and systems science outlets. She is an Editorial Board member for Edward Elgar's New Dimensions in Networks book series and for the Journal of Economic Interaction and Coordination. She currently serves as Associate Editor for the Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control (JEDC) and the Journal of Energy Markets, and is a past associate editor for Applied Mathematics and Computation (1991-2008), the Journal of Public Economic Theory (1997-2006), and the IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation (IEEE-TEC) (1996-2002). She has guest-edited special issues on ACE for the JEDC, Computational Economics, and the IEEE-TEC. From 2002-2004 she was a consultant for the Los Alamos National Laboratory. From 1996-2004 she served as contributing co-editor in charge of the Complexity-at-Large section of the journal Complexity. She is an active member and panel session organizer for several IEEE techical committees, working groups, and task forces. She has been a Program Committee member and session organizer for many of the annual conferences sponsored by the Society for Computational Economics (SCE), and is the contact liaison for the SCE Special Interest Group on ACE. She has twice served as an elected member of the SCE Advisory Council. She is a participating faculty member in the ISU Graduate Program on Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). Since July 1996 she has maintained an ACE website (and news mailing list) that provides pointers to introductory materials, readings, software, teaching resources, and annotated pointers to research groups and individual researchers. The ACE website has been designated as a select learning resource by the Scout Report for Business and Economics (January 29, 1998). She also maintains active resource websites on the Formation of Economic and Social Networks, on General Resources for Macro and Financial Economics, on Electricity Restructuring, and on Open-Source Software for Electricity Market Research, Teaching, and Training.