Team

Bell works on agent-based modeling of climate adaptation, migration, and food systems. He developed the MIDAS (Migration, Intensification, and Diversification as Adaptive Strategies) agent-based framework, formalized in Bell, Calvo-Hernandez & Oppenheimer (2019), and led the Bell et al. (2021) analysis projecting continued migration toward Bangladesh’s coast through 2100. Before joining Cornell in July 2024, he was Associate Professor at NYU.

Best works on climate migration modeling, environmental migration in coastal Bangladesh, and agent-based simulation. Her PhD (Earth and Environmental Sciences, Vanderbilt University, 2022) developed agent-based models of coastal Bangladesh migration — the same substantive ground as 3MIP’s first benchmark case. She is co-author of Migration and Displacement in a Changing Climate (Cambridge University Press, 2025) with Ober and McLeman, and joined Ohio State in 2023 with a joint appointment between engineering and city and regional planning.

Lars Tierolf is a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute for Environmental Studies (IVM). Here he works on the development of agent-based models that capture household adaptation and migration decisions in response to climate change. In his doctoral dissertation entitled “Rising Waters: Tradeoffs in Climate Migration and Adaptation Under Future Flood Risk” he combined agent-based modeling with flood risk assessment models to study household adaptation and migration behavior under increasing flood risk. His 2023 Nature Scientific Reports paper presents a coupled agent-based model for France simulating household adaptation and migration decisions under future coastal flood risk — an architecture directly relevant to the Bangladesh benchmark case.

Mario Keputa coordinates 3MIP’s operations across its co-leads, domain experts, and advisory committee. He holds an MPA in Financial and Economic Policy from Cornell University and has worked as a World Bank consultant on infrastructure and technology policy in Europe.

Nassos joined the Institute of Geography at CAU in 2008 and leads the CRSLR Research Group. He has a background in Surveying Engineering (MEng, NTU Athens) and Physical Geography (MSc, PhD, King’s College London) and has specialised in GIS and remote sensing. He worked one year in industry and did his postdoc at the Flood Hazard Research Centre (Middlesex University), where he worked on the DINAS-Coast and Atlantis projects. Before joining CAU he was a visiting researcher at the University of the Aegean (Greece) and at the University of Southampton (UK).

Nassos has participated in a number of collaborative research projects and has co-authored more than 100 peer-reviewed articles and book chapters. He was a lead author of the First Mediterranean Assessment Report (MAR1), which was awarded the North-South prize of the Council of Europe, and has contributed to the Stern Review and to the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report.

He teaches modules on Climate Change and Coastal Systems.

Hedda is a PhD researcher in the Coastal Risk and Sea Level Rise working group at the University of Kiel. Her work focuses on how spatial patterns of population development influence exposure and vulnerability to coastal hazards, including processes of flood-induced mobility and urbanization. She has a background in Geography and was part of the CoCliCo project, where she developed spatial population projections under different socio-economic scenarios using an extended gravity model.

Dr. Khandaker Jafor Ahmed was recently a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Michigan’s School for Environment and Sustainability, and previously at Georgetown University’s Institute for the Study of International Migration, where he worked on the Bangladesh Environment and Migration Survey (BEMS). His research examines climate vulnerability, migration, and health outcomes in low- and middle-income countries, with particular focus on how environmental stressors affect population displacement and vulnerable communities. He earned his PhD in Environmental Studies from the University of Adelaide (2022). With 30 peer-reviewed publications, his work integrates quantitative and qualitative methods to understand climate-demographic relationships.

Ramesh Poluru did his Masters and PhD in Population Studies from Sri Venkateswara University, Tirupati, India. Dr Poluru has more than two decades of experience in the conceptualization, implementation, and monitoring of large-scale socioeconomic, demographic, behavioural, biological, and operations research studies, and in the analysis and interpretation of primary and secondary data using both qualitative and quantitative approaches. He has published about 40 research papers in peer-reviewed journals, serves on research-proposal evaluation advisory committees, reviews for over forty journals and various international granting agencies, and sits on the editorial boards of eight international journals.

Dr. Muhammad Abdur Rahaman serves as Director of the Center for People & Environ (CPE). He has worked in the climate science and policy field for more than 20 years, serving national and international organizations as a researcher, practitioner, and development actor across climate change, climate displacement and migration solutions, disaster risk reduction, climate-smart agricultural innovations, and the climate-and-health nexus.