Special Projects

Francis Tseng

Lead Developer

As Lead Developer, Francis explores topics outside of JFI’s core proficiencies and provides technical support to the other initiatives.

Prior to JFI, Francis was adjunct faculty at the New School, co-publisher of The New Inquiry, researcher-in-residence at NEW INC, and a fellow at the New York Times. He has worked on various projects such as spatial economic agent-based modeling, matter.farm (public automated drug discovery), White Collar Crime Risk Zones (a critique of predictive policing), Bail Bloc (a collective cryptocurrency bail fund), the Founder (a dystopian business simulator), and other simulations around housing markets and automation.

Related Publication Series

Inside Out: Mining and Renewable Energy

The transition to a post-carbon energy economy will require extraction. Whatever the shape of the coming transition away from fossil fuels, the need to understand the social and distributional costs of a changing energy infrastructure has never been greater. This ongoing research project surveys the state of minerals production, near-future ploys for extra-terrestrial mining, and the persistent externalities of extraction.

Mineral Wealth and Electrification

The energy transition represents a significant opportunity for countries producing the materials critical to electrification. In this series, we look at eight such materials: aluminum, cobalt, copper, natural graphite, iron, lithium, manganese, and nickel. As demand for so-called “critical minerals” grows, producer countries must develop robust strategies for effective value capture to transform a temporary windfall into an opportunity to grow shared wealth and climb the value chain. Doing so demands both institutional capacity and political will.

Related Initiatves

Affiliate and Emerging Initiatives

Financing the Energy Transition

Higher Education Finance

Social Wealth

We build tools, conduct research, and develop partnerships to help transform public assets into long-term financial portfolios in service of the public interest.

Publications