Jennifer Helgeson

Jennifer Helgeson is a research economist in the applied economics office of the Engineering Laboratory at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and leads the office's work on the economics of community resilience planning.

Currently, Helgeson is a member of the National Construction Safety Team technical investigation of Hurricane Maria and its impacts on Puerto Rico. The NIST Hurricane Maria program also includes NIST’s national windstorm impact reduction program (NWIRP) study to better understand recovery processes in Puerto Rico following Hurricane Maria. Under this NWIRP study, she leads a project to determine the impacts to and recovery of small and medium-sized manufacturers and the retail and service industries. Helgeson also leads a primary data collection effort in partnership with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration focused on decision-making processes for small and medium-sized businesses in response to hurricane events and extreme flooding.

In the past, Helgeson was a researcher at the Centre for International Climate and Environmental Research, Norway and the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, France. Following the completion of her bachelor’s degree in economics at Brandeis University, she received a Fulbright Grant to Norway. She earned her master’s degree in environmental change and management with a focus on environmental economics at the University of Oxford, United Kingdom. Helgeson holds a PhD from the London School of Economics, where she was awarded a Grantham Institute for Climate Change Research Scholarship and supported by a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship.