Ryan B. Williams

Associate Professor
Department of Agricultural and Applied Economics
College of Agricultural Sciences & Natural Resources

What are your current research interests?

I work on environmental and natural resource challenges within the water-energy-food nexus and market-based approaches to valuing the environment. More recently, my interest has shifted to experimental methods to improve our understanding of how individuals incorporate environmental beliefs into their preferences for environmental attributes relative to the consumption of goods and services.

In addition to my work with the environment and resources, I have also been working with a colleague in Oman to develop decision tools to improve the efficiency of livestock feed formulations. We hope to extend the model to incorporate regional environmental impacts of feed input production and the availability of storage and regional transportation systems. My hope is that this research will prove helpful to the dairy industry as it expands in the southern High Plains of Texas.

Finally, I am most excited about ongoing transdisciplinary collaborations with other faculty in CASNR, Psychological Sciences, the Rawls College of Business, Biological Sciences, Texas A&M AgriLife Research in Lubbock, and at other Universities. These projects cover a breadth of topics which include antibiotic resistance, rural suicide, oil and gas produced water for irrigated agriculture, and extremist group membership. I value these research opportunities because they are likely to result in outputs which more directly benefit society than work I pursue strictly within my subdiscipline. I also find the process of learning about others' research expertise and identifying how my expertise fits with the research question to be intellectually satisfying.

What types of outreach and engagement have you been involved with?

Most recently, I have had the pleasure of assisting the leadership of the Texas Tech University System with the pursuit of establishing a school of veterinary medicine. I had done some consulting work for the American Veterinary Medical Association (AVMA) related to the labor market for veterinarians and the role that schools of veterinary medicine play in that market, and was asked to employ my skills as an economist to assess the viability of a new school in Texas. This project has proven to be one of the most rewarding enterprises I have undertaken.

Locally, I have been involved with the High Plains Underground Water District, the Ogallala Aquifer Project, and served as a panelist at the "Rethinking Texas Water Policy" conference at the The Bush School of Government & Public Service at Texas A&M University. I consulted leadership from the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department with respect to conservation banking and conservation credit markets for Lesser Prairie-Chicken habitat and have been involved with the Playa Lakes Joint Venture in efforts to preserve and rehabilitate the playa lake ecosystem. I also served for a year on the Board of Directors for the Lubbock Downtown Farmers Market.

Internationally, I was invited to speak at the 2nd International Conference on Natural Resource Management and Public Policy in Wuhan, Peoples Republic of China, invited as part of a delegation from Texas Tech University to the Sultanate of Oman to discuss our ability to assist with Oman's research needs, and have helped lead our Agribusiness in Spain study abroad program.

Why did you choose this field?

I grew up in a community for which economic livelihoods were largely tied to natural resources – fisheries, logging, ranching, and dairy production. The community was also home to a relatively large population of environmental activists. As an individual that loved to engage in activities made pleasurable by the environment of my home, but also cognizant of the importance of economic activity to sustain a population, I couldn't understand how, as a society, we couldn't figure out how to balance the two objectives.

When I took my first course in economics, I was immediately taken with the idea that prices could be so effective at allocating resources. The idea that buyers and sellers, through their interaction of establishing a price, are both made better off by engaging in mutually beneficial exchange seemed like the secret solution to most problems – yet no one in my prior educational experience had ever mentioned it. My fascination with the beauty of markets has continued to drive my passion for the field of economics.

 

How do you define good teaching?

I consider teaching to be good when students either are inspired to pursue knowledge on their own or are challenged to such a degree that they discover the ability to learn a difficult concept. The methods vary by student, content area, and level of course, which is what makes good teaching an art rather than an exact science. I provide students with real world examples to think through, try to connect scientific reasoning to their personal lives, employ in-class experiential learning opportunities, and, most importantly, let students know that I believe they are capable of learning more than what has been expected of them previously.

What is your proudest professional accomplishment?

It's really a toss-up between two distinct types of accomplishment. The first is having successfully mentored an undergraduate student through to a faculty position, and the second is having influenced a field in psychology by introducing an empirical methodology that I had been exploring in my economics research.

The student was interested in my own research questions that I had presented in an undergraduate course. He wanted to know how one would go about answering the research question and what it would take to end up in a career that allowed him to do the same. He completed his MS under my advisement by writing his thesis on the research question I had posed in class. He successfully published two articles out of that thesis, presented his research at multiple professional conferences, and earned lucrative assistantship offers from multiple Ph.D. programs. He now holds a faculty position at a land grant institution and is mentoring new scientists toward careers in economics research.

In the prevention of suicide, one of the challenges is that there is an underreporting of thoughts of suicide by those experiencing distress. But due to the large share of the population that truly isn't experiencing distress it is very difficult to distinguish between individuals that are not suffering and those that are but aren't admitting to those thoughts. My wife is a clinical psychologist that studies suicide in older adults. When she asked me about my thoughts on her statistical analyses, I mentioned that I had been working with data which were distributed very similarly. By employing the same type of analysis that I had utilized to study the development of wind energy facilities we were able to offer methods that the health community could employ when working with individuals who might not be admitting to their thoughts of suicide. The methodology is now being incorporated into more analyses of data on self-reported thoughts of suicide.

How do you integrate research and outreach into teaching?

One of the most effective methods in teaching economics is to have students practice applying economic reasoning to real world examples. While there are published books that contain vignettes for this purpose, I have found that students tend to take more interest in the problems that I bring to class from my own research and outreach projects. The beauty of using these examples is that there isn't a well-documented "solution," so the students explore the problem along with me. Furthermore, it is not uncommon for a class to pose a question that extends a research project or inspires a new one.

More about Ryan B. Williams

Ryan Blake Williams, Ph.D. is an associate professor in the Department of Agricultural & Applied Economics at Texas Tech University and holds a joint appointment as associate professor with Texas A&M AgriLife Research at Lubbock. He also serves as the Director of the newly established Texas Tech University Food and Resource Experimental Economics Laboratory, which utilizes space on both the Texas Tech campus and in the Department of Agriculture at Angelo State University.

Dr. Williams joined the faculty of Texas Tech University in 2009 and began his role in the Department of Agricultural & Applied Economics in 2011. He currently teaches undergraduate courses in agricultural price theory and applied optimization methods, and a graduate course in environmental and resource economics offered for non-majors. Williams also co-leads the Agribusiness in Spain study abroad program where he teaches agribusiness enterprise management. He has received departmental and college awards recognizing his teaching effectiveness.

His research interests include the economics of the water-energy-food nexus and its components. Additionally, Dr. Williams focuses on valuing environmental attributes and applying those valuation methods to emerging and nonexistent markets. His research has been funded by the National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA), USDA Ogallala Aquifer Program, and the High Plains Water District.

Williams earned his B.A. in Economics from Emory University, his M.E. in Economics from North Carolina State University, and his Ph.D. in Economics from Texas Tech University.