Esther Duflo life and biography

Esther Duflo is a French microbiologist who developed researches on microeconomic issues in developing countries, including household behavior, education, access to finance, health, and policy evaluation. Together with Abhijit Banerjee, Dean Karlan, Michael Kremer, John A. List, and Sendhil Mullainathan, she has been a driving force in advancing field experiments as an important methodology to discover causal relationships in economics.

She is a recipient of the 2010 John Bates Clark Medal for economists under the age of forty who are judged to have made the most significant contribution to economic thought and knowledge. She received her (first) honorary doctorate from the Université catholique de Louvain, Belgium Feb 2, 2010.

In 2009 she was named a MacArthur Foundation Fellow, otherwise known as a "genius" grant. She is also a fellow of American Academy of Arts and Sciences from 2009. On May 21, 2009 she was selected as the first recipient of the Calvó-Armengol International Prize, which she finally received on June 4, 2010. This is awarded every two years to a top young researcher in economics or the social sciences for contributions to the theory and comprehension of the mechanisms of social interaction.

The US magazine Foreign Policy named her as one of the top 100 public intellectuals in the world in May 2008. In 2010, Foreign Policy again named her to its list of top 100 global thinkers. The Economist lists Duflo as one of the top 8 young economists in the world. She was named one of Time Magazine's 100 most influential people in the world in April 2011.

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