Speaker Series with Sendhil Mullainathan

Sendhil Mullainathan

Sendhil Mullainathan is the Robert C. Waggoner Professor of Economics in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and Affiliate in Computer Science in the John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Harvard University. He was recently Visiting Professor at the University of Chicago, Booth School of Business (2016-17).

His fields of interest are Behavioral Economics, Poverty, Applied Econometrics, and Machine Learning. He has worked on a wide variety of topics: the impact of poverty on mental bandwidth; whether CEO pay is excessive; using fictitious resumes to measure discrimination; showing that higher cigarette taxes makes smokers happier; modeling how competition affects media bias; and a model of coarse thinking. His latest research focuses on using machine learning and data mining techniques to better understand human behavior.  

He enjoys writing, having recently co-authored Scarcity: Why Having too Little Means so Much and writes regularly for the New York Times.

He helped co-found a non-profit to apply behavioral science (ideas42), co-founded a center to promote the use of randomized control trials in development (the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab), serves on the board of the MacArthur Foundation, has worked in government in various roles, is affiliated with the NBER, BREAD, and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

He is a recipient of the MacArthur “genius” Award, was designated a “Young Global Leader” by the World Economic Forum, labeled a “Top 100 Thinker” by Foreign Policy Magazine, and named to the “Smart List: 50 people who will change the world” by Wired Magazine (UK). His hobbies include basketball, board games, Googling, and fixing-up classic espresso machines.