Dr. Stephan Dietrich
Economics, Assistant Professor, Maastricht University & United Nations University - MERIT
Stephan researches the use of data in public policy making, focusing on validating existing approaches to measure and utilize data for policy design and implementation. This includes verifying that automated decision-making systems are unbiased and fair, and ensuring that food security assessments based on national statistics are accurate. His work also explores new approaches to measure phenomena relevant to policy design and assessment, such as using subjective well-being data to measure global warming damages and applying social sensing tools for remote polling of preferences and opinions. He is particularly interested in applications involving food prices and insurance mechanisms in food insecure regions, targeting of social policies, and taxation. As an academic lecturer, Stephan teaches courses at the Master's and PhD level, including introductory data science and machine learning for public policy.
