Tim Thomas is a senior research fellow in the Environment and Production Technology Division. His research focuses on the impact of climate change on agricultural productivity. This work has expanded recently to include evaluating the fuller impact of climate change by accounting for uncertainty and inter-annual variability, especially in regard to extreme events and low-productivity years.

Tim’s work involves developing innovative methods for simulated climate futures; generating crop yield emulators to provide intuition and to speed simulations; and model coordination between climate, crop, water, energy, and economics. Tim has also done work in a variety of domains, developing innovative methods such as spatial disaggregation (applied to gridded agricultural GDP in Brazil); determining optimal cropland level subnationally (for Ethiopia); and together with other researchers, investigating the impact of climate change on aflatoxins.