ESTHER DUFLO is the Abdul Latif Jameel Professor of Poverty Alleviation and Development Economics in the Department of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is a co-founder and director of the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab, and on the board of directors of the Bureau for Research and Economic Analysis of Development (BREAD). She is the director of the development economics program at the Center of Economic Policy Research. She currently serves as the inaugural editor of the American Economic Journal: Applied Economics. She received her undergraduate from the Ecole Normale Supérieure (Paris) in 1994, and her Ph.D. in economics from MIT in 1999.
She is the recipient of the American Economic Association’s Elaine Bennett Prize for Research (2003), the Bronze Medal from the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (2005) and Le Monde’s Cercle des économistes Best Young French Economist Prize (2005). She will be the inaugural holder of the chair “Knowledge Against Poverty” at the College de France (2008-2009). In 2008, she was named by Foreign Policy as one of the “top 100 public intellectuals”. Duflo specializes in development economics and the design and rigorous evaluation of effective anti-poverty policies. Among other things, she has studied household behavior and educational choice; returns to education and social services deliveries in developing countries; credit constraints and other barriers to technology adoption.
