Kamilya Tazhibayeva is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Economics at MIT. Her areas of specialization are economic development, with a focus on human capital and agricultural development, and applied microeconomics. Kamilya’s current research, in collaboration with MIT Professor Robert M. Townsend, is on the effects of weather shocks and climate change on vulnerable communities in developing countries, the socio-economic mechanisms through which these effects disseminate spatially, and construction of effective weather insurance products for crop farmers. This work is innovative in integrating economic modeling with a soil science crop simulation model and global climate change models. Kamilya received a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Chicago. During her graduate work she researched the effects of intergenerational rural-urban migration choices on individual schooling and first post-schooling employment outcomes in developing economies, where schooling quality and availability vary drastically between rural and urban areas.