Sam is interested in a range of economic and environmental issues related to agricultural bioenergy feedstock production in the US. His research focuses on developing an integrated assessment framework for biofuels that merges spatially-explicit ecological process models with economic models of land-use change. He works for the Energy Bioscience Institute (EBI), an interdisciplinary research and development organization for next-generation biofuels. Sam received his Ph.D. in Agricultural and Resource Economics from Colorado State University.