Staller Lecture hosts Dartmouth economist Heidi Williams

The Department of Economics will bring economist Heidi Williams to campus for a Sept. 5 talk, "Innovation and Productivity Policies: A Budgetary Perspective.”

Williams serves as a professor at Dartmouth College and is the director of science policy at the Institute for Progress, a nonprofit think tank in Washington, D.C. Her expertise lies in the intersection of science, innovation, and policy, focusing on how these elements can be optimized to benefit society broadly.

“Heidi Williams is conducting pathbreaking research on some of the most important issues in health economics, including how government policy affects incentives for companies to invest money in new medical technologies that can improve our health, and why medical spending and health outcomes differ so substantially across geographic areas in the United States,” said Sean Nicholson, professor of economics in the College of Arts & Sciences and in the Brooks School of Public Policy. “Heidi’s work has, and will continue to have, a big impact on how policymakers view the health care market.”

Williams co-chairs J-PAL’s Science for Progress Initiative and co-directs the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER)'s Innovation Policy working group. She is also lead editor of the Journal of Economic Perspectives, a nonresident senior fellow at the Hutchins Center on Fiscal and Monetary Policy at Brookings, and a visiting scholar at the Entrepreneurial Management unit at Harvard Business School. 

Williams received her bachelor’s degree in mathematics from Dartmouth College in 2003, her master’s in development economics from Oxford University in 2004, and her Ph.D. in economics from Harvard in 2010. 

She is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the Econometric Society, and is the recipient of a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship (2015), an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship (2015) and the ASHEcon Medal (2021).

The lecture is set for 4:30-6 p.m. on Thursday, Sept. 5 in 200 Baker Lab.

The George Staller Lecture is a Cornell economics tradition made possible by a gift from Russell B. Hawkins '77. Staller, professor emeritus of economics, taught at Cornell for 49 years and as a visiting professor at Charles University in Prague, Czechoslovakia, for 15 years. Born in Czechoslovakia, Staller witnessed the invasion and occupation of his country by the Nazis, then fled to Vienna, Austria in 1949. He passed away in 2009.