Advancing Climate and Energy Policy Through Data-Driven Economics: An Interview with Dr. Tomiwa Sunday Adebayo
Your academic journey started in economics and finance. What motivated your transition to fields like climate change, renewable energy, and environmental policy?
My early work in economics and finance kept bumping into questions that markets alone could not answer, such as energy price shocks, stranded asset risk, and distributional effects of transition policies. As climate risk began to affect capital costs and growth, it became natural to apply my empirical toolkit, including time series and quantile or wavelet methods, to problems where evidence can shape policy.
Renewable energy and environmental policy offered that bridge, the same rigor on causality and mechanisms, now aimed at reliability, affordability, and decarbonization. In short, I did not leave finance; I redirected it toward climate solutions where findings can guide both markets and policy.
As a researcher at the NEU Center for Operations Research in Health, how does the center’s interdisciplinary focus influence your work? Do you see links between energy, climate, and health policies?
The center’s mix of operations research, epidemiology, and public policy pushes my work toward systems thinking, and we use the same optimization and causal-inference tools to study hospital resilience, supply chains, and energy systems. The links are concrete, since heatwaves and air pollution raise admissions, energy poverty worsens health outcomes, and clean power or efficient buildings deliver immediate health co-benefits while cutting emissions. Methods transfer both ways, from queueing and stochastic control for intensive-care capacity to grid reliability and demand response, and from time-series or quantile models in energy to forecasting clinical loads under climate stress. This interdisciplinary lens helps design policies that align reliability, affordability, and decarbonization with measurable health gains.
You’ve been listed among the top 2% of most influential scientists by Stanford University. What does this recognition mean to you personally and professionally?
It is a meaningful affirmation of years of collaborative, peer-reviewed work, and it raises the bar for rigor, transparency, and impact in what I do next. Personally it is motivating and a reminder to pay it forward through mentorship and open, reproducible research. Professionally it strengthens partnerships with scholars, industry, and policymakers, helping translate methods and evidence into decisions on energy, climate, and health that improve lives.
How do you view the role of economic tools—such as carbon taxes, subsidies, or investment incentives—in combating climate change?
Economic tools work best as a coherent package that prices emissions, accelerates clean investment, and protects vulnerable households. A well designed carbon tax gives a clear price signal and can fund rebates, grid upgrades, and R&D, while targeted subsidies and contracts for difference de risk early deployment and learning. Investment incentives crowd in private capital for storage, transmission, and efficiency, provided they are transparent, time bound, and aligned with measurable outcomes. Paired with standards and border adjustments to limit leakage, this mix delivers both near term adoption and long run innovation.
What would you advise young researchers who want to shift into interdisciplinary fields? Especially those from economics backgrounds interested in sustainability and energy policy?
Start with a clear problem where your economics toolkit can add value, then learn the domain basics of energy systems, climate science, and regulation through short courses and field seminars.
Build a mixed toolbox that blends causal inference, time series, and optimization with geospatial data, power system models, and lifecycle metrics, and keep everything reproducible with version control and shared notebooks. Coauthor with engineers, public health or policy scholars, and practitioners so your questions and data reflect real constraints.
Aim for outputs that speak to both journals and decision makers, such as policy briefs and code repos tied to measurable indicators.
About the Researcher
Dr. Tomiwa Sunday Adebayo is a researcher at Near East University’s Operational Research Center in Healthcare. He is also an Adjunct Professor at Azerbaijan University of Economics, Azerbaijan, and VIZJA University, Warsaw, Poland. He holds a B.Tech. in Management and Accounting from Ladoke Akintola University of Technology, Nigeria (2012); an M.A. in International Finance from the European University of Lefke (2017); an M.Sc. in Economics from Girne American University (2019); and a Ph.D. in Business Administration, with a specialization in Energy Economics, from Cyprus International University (2023).
His work spans applied and environmental economics, energy policy econometrics, financial markets, and time-series and panel-data analysis. He is proficient in EViews, R/RStudio, MATLAB, STATA, and Python. He also serves as an associate editor for Innovations in Environmental Economics and Earth Systems, Resources, and Sustainability.
Dr. Adebayo has supervised undergraduate and graduate theses and has served as an external examiner at universities in North Cyprus, Turkey, Australia, and Pakistan. He has been ranked among the top 2% of scientists worldwide for four consecutive years (2022–2025).