Elías Cisneros is currently an assistant professor of Political Economy and Sustainability at the University of Texas Dallas.



Elías was a postdoctoral researcher at the Faculty of Business and Economics at the University of Göttingen and the University of Texas at Austin.



His areas of research are the political economy of environmental degradation, development economics, and conflict economics. In particular, he combines spatial data on biophysical conditions with exogenous market and political shocks to investigate human behavior and the transformation of landscapes. Remotely sensed high-resolution and high-frequency data on forest losses, fires, as well as geo-coded policies and social media data allow him to explore the dynamic processes of the economy and policy. He thereby aims to inform society and policymakers for better governance of the environment.



Elías studied economics at the University of Freiburg where he received his diploma in 2012. At the University of Bonn, he first worked as a research assistant at the Center for Development Research (2012-2015) and later as a research and teaching assistant at the Institute for Food and Resource Economics (2015-2017). In 2017, he received his doctoral degree and subsequently joined our team in 2018 participating in the CRC990 project: Determinants of regional patterns of deforestation and land use in Indonesia.



In 2021, he received a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Global fellowship to investigate the interlinkages between human health and land-use change at a global scale.