Esther Duflo is the Lemann Foundation Professor in the Department of Economics at the University of Zurich and holds the Chair in Poverty and Public Policies at the Collège de France. She is also a co-founder and co-director of J-PAL, the poverty action lab. In her research, she seeks to understand the economic lives of the poor, with the aim of helping to design and evaluate social policies and programs. She has worked on health, education, financial inclusion, the environment, and governance.
Esther Duflo holds degrees in history and economics from the École normale supérieure in Paris. She then earned her Ph.D. in economics from MIT in 1999.
Duflo has received numerous academic awards and honors, including the 2019 Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel (jointly with Abhijit Banerjee and Michael Kremer), the Princess of Asturias Award for Social Sciences (2015), the A.SK Social Science Prize (2015), the Infosys Prize (2014), the David N. Kershaw Prize (2011), the John Bates Clark Medal (2010), and a MacArthur “Genius Grant” (2009). Together with Abhijit Banerjee, she co-authored *Rethinking Poverty*, which won the 2011 Financial Times and Goldman Sachs “Business Book of the Year” award and has been translated into seventeen languages. Together, they published *Useful Economics for Difficult Times* in 2020 .
Esther Duflo is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and a corresponding fellow of the British Academy.
