AREC would like to welcome its newest staff member John Jensenius III, the lab manager of the Symons Hall Experimental Lab (SHEL).
In this role, Jensenius is responsible for organizing and maintaining a subject pool of students at the university for experiments. He also schedules and administers experiments that happen within SHEL.
“I’d like to build the lab up to something that is useful to the university and researchers in the area as a whole, as well as the academic community,” said Jensenius. He first became interested in experimental economics while in his undergraduate years at Case Western Reserve University (CWRU).
At CWRU Jensenius enjoyed a game theory course, and as a result took a class taught by the same professor in experimental economics. From there he became a research assistant in experimental economics. After completing his undergraduate degrees in economics and computer science, Jensenius went to Florida State to earn his doctorate in economics. He completed his Ph.D. in 2016.
It was also during this time that Jensenius began working at the Centre for Experimental Social Sciences, or CESS, at the University of Oxford. With CESS, he helped open laboratories in Chile and India.
“I’m excited at the prospect of restoring the lab and starting fresh,” said Jensenius. “It’s also great to be back in the U.S. for personal reasons. It’s good to be much closer to family.”
SHEL is located in the ground floor of Symons Hall, and is currently signing up students to take part in experiments. Participants receive monetary compensation based on the decisions they make in the experiment. These experiments are usually one to two hours long, and payments typically range from $7 to $25 or more. Participants must be University of Maryland students over the age of 18. For more information, please visit https://shel.arec.umd.edu/participate.
