Ms. Sarah Emerson

Managing Director

Energy Security Analysis, Inc.

Sarah Emerson is the Managing Director of Energy Security Analysis, Inc. (ESAI), an independent energy research and forecasting firm in Boston, Massachusetts. Ms. Emerson joined ESAI when the petroleum consulting practice was launched in 1986. As Director of Petroleum Analysis, she has developed many of ESAI’s analytical tools for assessing the oil market and forecasting oil prices. In addition, she has supervised the development of an empirical source database of monthly oil data that covers the period from January 1978 to the present for every country in the world, with particular focus on non-OECD countries. More broadly, she has conducted several industry studies on a diverse range of topics, such as the transfer of pollution in energy trade, the profitability of Asian refining, the future of the Asian bitumen market, petroleum product markets in the Indian Ocean, the outlook for global automotive fuel markets, and the future of the Russian refining industry. She regularly publishes articles in the energy trade press and is frequently quoted in the press and interviewed on television. Ms. Emerson received her B.A. from Cornell University and her M.A. from the Johns Hopkins University Nitze School of Advanced International Studies. In addition to her market analysis and forecasting activities, Ms. Emerson is an expert witness in energy sector litigation and an adviser to the U.S., Japanese, and Indian governments on energy security issues.

Post-Doctoral Fellow

Dr. Juan Delgado

Directorate General for Competition

European Commission, Brussels

Juan Delgado is an economist at the Directorate General for Competition of the European Commission (Brussels, Belgium), where he aids in the development of telecommunications systems, local loop unbundling, broadband systems, antitrust, and regulatory policy. Previously, he worked as an economist with the Spanish telecommunications regulator CMT, where he dealt with liberalization, regulation, and antitrust issues. He has also taught economics at the Universidad Carlos III in Madrid, Spain. He holds a Ph.D. in Economics from the Universidad Carlos III and a M.S. in Economics from Warwick University in the United Kingdom. He has written on competition issues in liberalized industries, and has published in the Journal of Economic Theory and in the Journal of Industrial Economics. Juan received the Universidad Carlos III Ph.D. Extraordinary Award (2001-2003) for the best Ph.D. thesis in economics and the British Council and the Fundacion Caja de Ahorros del Mediterraneo scholarship to complete his M.S. in Economics at the University of Warwick.

Dr. Jens Weinmann, Ph.D.

Decision Science

University of London

Jens Weinmann is currently finishing his Ph.D. in Decision Science at London Business School, University of London. His research focuses on institutional changes in the Latin American energy sector over the last two decades, with a special emphasis on electricity markets in the context of developing countries. He is exploring the dynamics of electricity sector regulation and liberalization with a view on factors that accelerate or delay regulatory reforms, including the natural resource endowment and its consequences on governmental policies. He is interested in the phenomenon of policy emulation and institutional isomorphism and has analyzed the spread of liberalization policies across Latin America, combining multivariate statistics with sociological theories. Most recently, he explored institutional change from a corporate perspective in respect to the privatizations of generation and distribution companies during the 1990s. He studied at the Technical University in Berlin. After joining the Decision Science Department at London Business School, he also collaborated with the World Energy Council on the study “Pricing Energy in Developing Countries.” During his studies in Berlin and London, he received grants from the German National Merit Foundation (Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes) and the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC).

Ms. Fan Zhang

Ph.D. Candidate, Public Policy

Harvard University

Fan Zhang is a Ph.D. candidate in Public Policy at the Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University where she is a Pre-Doctoral Fellow with the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs and the Environmental Economics Program. She is interested in environmental and energy economics and international environmental policy. Her current research analyzes the impact of multi-dimensional uncertainties of the deregulated electricity market on producers’ investment decisions regarding clean technology. Fan received her M.S. in Environmental Economics and Management from Peking University in 2002 and a B.S. in Environmental Science from Zhongshan University in 1999, both with the highest honors. From 1999 to 2003, she worked with the Center for Environmental Sciences of Peking University, The Chinese Academy of Sciences, and the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) on development and environmental protection issues, including regional water and air quality management, national land use, land cover change analysis, and green accounting systems.

Ms. Hailing Zang

Ph.D. Candidate, Economics

Texas A&M University

Hailing Zang is currently a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Economics, Texas A&M University. Her research interests are empirical industrial organization, game theory, and econometrics. She wishes to apply recently developed empirical auction methodologies and game theory to the study of the wholesale electricity market and particularly to the empirical study of the impact of financial transmission rights on the efficiency of the wholesale electricity market. She is currently studying oligopoly supply function equilibrium under dynamic games and the impact of financial transmission rights on bidding behavior. At Texas A&M University, where she works as a research assistant for Prof. Steven Puller on the study of the Texas electricity market, she was awarded the Regents Fellowship. She received a bachelor’s degree in Economics from Fudan University in Shanghai, China. She was also awarded Shanghai Outstanding Student Award, the highest honor to undergraduate students in the city of Shanghai.