Lynne Lewis

Lynne Lewis

Lynne Lewis is the Elmer W. Campbell Chair of Economics at Bates College. She received her Ph.D. in economics from the University of Colorado in 1994 after finishing a two-year dissertation fellowship at the Environmental and Societal Impacts Group at the National Center for Atmospheric Research. Her dissertation received the Universities Council on Water Resources Dissertation Award in 1995. Prior to coming to Bates she served on the faculty at the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies.

Her work has covered topics including valuation of ecosystem services, water quality trading, water allocation and the impacts of climate change. As part of the Maine Sustainability Solutions Initiative team, her work focuses on valuing the potential benefits from dam removals and river restoration. Much of this new research involves estimating distance decay in willingness to pay for river restoration and on building a bioeconomic model connecting freshwater systems to the inshore cod fishery. This work is joint with colleagues at Bowdoin and the University of Southern Maine.  She is also beginning new, unrelated research examining economic resilience and capacity building in the face of rapid glacier melt.

Lewis also co-authors the popular Environmental and Natural Resource Economics textbook with Tom Tietenberg. The 10th edition of this book is forthcoming in early 2014.

She currently serves on the Board of Maine Audubon, the Penobscot River Science Steering Committee and the Advisory Board of Mitchell Center for Environment and Watershed Research. She received the friend of UCOWR award in 2005.

Lewis’s teaching areas include microeconomics, environmental economics, natural resource economics and valuation. She is currently the Chair of the Economics Department.