Esther Duflo, the Abdul Latif Jameel Professor of Poverty Alleviation and Development Economics in the Department of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, will deliver the Commencement Address during the bachelor’s degree ceremony.
Dr. Duflo is co-founder and co-director of the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab at MIT, which promotes the use of randomized controlled trials in policy evaluation — more than 400 million people have been impacted by programs tested by the lab’s affiliated researchers — and the chair of Poverty and Public Policy at the Collège de France. Since 2024 she has also served as the president of the Paris School of Economics.
Her research seeks to understand the economic lives of people living in poverty, with the aim of helping design and evaluate social policies. She has worked on health, education, financial inclusion, environment, and governance. In 2019, she, Abhijit Banerjee, and Michael Kremer received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences “for their experimental approach to alleviating global poverty.”
Dr. Duflo has received numerous academic honors and prizes: the Princess of Asturias Award for Social Sciences, the A.SK Social Science Award, Infosys Prize, the David N. Kershaw Award, a John Bates Clark Medal, and a MacArthur “Genius Grant” Fellowship. With Abhijit Banerjee, she wrote Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty, which won the Financial Times/Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award in 2011 and has been translated into more than 17 languages, and Good Economics for Hard Times.
Duflo is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy, a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, a board member of the Bureau for Research and Economic Analysis of Development, and the director of the development economics program of the Centre for Economic Policy Research.
Professor Junfu Zhang will present Dr. Duflo for the degree of Doctor of Laws.