Kenneth B. Medlock III

Kenneth B. Medlock III, Ph.D., is the James A. Baker, III, and Susan G. Baker Fellow in Energy and Resource Economics at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy and the senior director of the Center for Energy Studies, as well as an adjunct professor and lecturer in the Department of Economics and adjunct assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering at Rice University. He is a principal in the development of the Rice World Natural Gas Trade Model, aimed at assessing the future of international natural gas trade. He has published numerous scholarly articles in his primary areas of interest: natural gas markets, energy commodity price relationships, gasoline markets, transportation, national oil company behavior, economic development and energy demand, and energy use and the environment. He also teaches courses in energy economics and supervises Ph.D. students in the energy economics field.

Medlock is currently the vice president for conferences for the United States Association for Energy Economics (USAEE), and previously served as vice president for academic affairs. In 2001, he won (joint with Ron Soligo) the International Association for Energy Economics Award for Best Paper of the Year in the Energy Journal. In 2011, he was given the USAEE’s Senior Fellow Award, and in 2013 he accepted on behalf of the Center for Energy Studies the USAEE’s Adelman-Frankel Award. In 2012, Medlock received the prestigious Haydn Williams Fellowship at Curtin University in Perth, Australia. He is also an active member of the American Economic Association and the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists, and is an academic member of the National Petroleum Council (NPC). Medlock has served as an advisor to the U.S. Department of Energy and the California Energy Commission in their respective energy modeling efforts. He was the lead modeler of the Modeling Subgroup of the 2003 NPC study of long-term natural gas markets in North America, and was a contributing author to the recent NPC study “North American Resource Development.”

Medlock received his Ph.D. in economics from Rice in 2000, and held the MD Anderson Fellowship at the Baker Institute from 2000 to 2001.