Short Bio: Leigh Tesfatsion

Last Updated: 7 October 2007

Address:
Professor of Economics and Mathematics
Heady Hall 375
Iowa State University
Ames, IA 50011-1070
Tel: (515) 294-7318
FAX: (515) 294-0221
http://www.econ.iastate.edu/tesfatsi/
tesfatsi AT iastate.edu
Photo of Leigh Tesfatsion

Leigh Tesfatsion received the Ph.D. degree in economics, with a minor in mathematics, from the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, in 1975. She joined the Department of Economics at the University of Southern California in 1975, where she subsequently was promoted to associate and full professor. In 1990 she accepted a position as Professor of Economics at Iowa State University, with a courtesy appointment as Professor of Mathematics.

Her current research focuses on agent-based computational economics (ACE), the computational study of economic processes modeled as dynamic systems of interacting agents. Her particular interest is the development of empirically-based ACE frameworks for the study of restructured electricity markets. Her past research includes work on endogenous worker-employer matching, financial intermediation in macroeconomies, human capital investment, decision making under uncertainty, game theory, adaptive control, automatic differentiation, adaptive homotopy continuation, nonlinear filtering, multicriteria associative memories, and a multicriteria flexible least squares (FLS) technique for model specification and estimation that has been incorporated into the statistical packages GAUSS and SHAZAM. This research has been reported in over ninety publications in economics, mathematics, statistics, engineering, and systems science outlets.

She is an Editorial Board member for Edward Elgar's New Dimensions in Networks book series and for the Journal of Economic Interaction and Coordination. She currently serves as Associate Editor for the Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control (JEDC) and the Journal of Energy Markets, and is a past associate editor for Applied Mathematics and Computation (1991-2008), the Journal of Public Economic Theory (1997-2006), and the IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation (IEEE-TEC) (1996-2002). She has guest-edited special issues on ACE for the JEDC, Computational Economics, and the IEEE-TEC. From 2002-2004 she was a consultant for the Los Alamos National Laboratory. From 1996-2004 she served as contributing co-editor in charge of the Complexity-at-Large section of the journal Complexity.

She is the co-organizer (with Prof. Chen-Ching Liu, ECpE) of the ISU Electric Energy Economics (E3) Group. She is an active member and panel session organizer for several IEEE techical committees, working groups, and task forces. She has been a Program Committee member and session organizer for many of the annual conferences sponsored by the Society for Computational Economics (SCE), and is the contact liaison for the SCE Special Interest Group on ACE. She has twice served as an elected member of the SCE Advisory Council. She is a participating faculty member in the ISU Graduate Program on Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and an Affiliate Faculty Member of the ISU Center for Computational Intelligence, Learning and Discovery (CCILD).

Since July 1996 she has maintained an ACE website (and news mailing list) that provides pointers to introductory materials, readings, software, teaching resources, and annotated pointers to research groups and individual researchers. The ACE website has been designated as a select learning resource by the Scout Report for Business and Economics (January 29, 1998). She also maintains resource websites on the Formation of Economic and Social Networks, on General Resources for Macro and Financial Economics, on Electricity Restructuring, and on Open-Source Software for Electricity Market Research, Teaching, and Training.

For further information about her research and professional service activities, please refer to her on-line vita (html).

Selected Publications