Esther Duflo, the Abdul Latif Jameel Professor of Poverty Alleviation and Developmental Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is the winner of the 2015 Princess of Asturias Award for Social Sciences from the Princess of Asturias Foundation in Spain. She will be honored in October in a ceremony in Oviedo hosted by King Felipe of Spain for “her innovative and decisive contributions to development economics and the studies of policies to reduce poverty.”
In announcing the award the foundation said that Professor “Duflo has applied novel experimental methods to evaluate the effectiveness of policies to reduce economic and social inequality, especially in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. The results of her research have profoundly renewed the design of strategies in the fields of education, health, microfinance, and employment.”
Dr. Duflo, a native of France, is the winner of a MacArthur genius award. She holds a master’s degree from the Paris School of Economics and Ph.D. in economics from MIT. Professor Duflo is the co-author of the critically acclaimed book Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty (PublicAffairs, 2011).