Heidi Williams

Heidi Williams is a nonresident senior fellow with the Hutchins Center on Fiscal and Monetary Policy at Brookings and a Professor of Economics at Dartmouth College. Her teaching and research focus on how society can best support science and innovation, and how we can best ensure that science and innovation generate broad benefits to society. She is the Director of Science Policy at the Institute for Progress, a non-partisan think tank based in Washington DC. Together with Paul Niehaus, she co-chairs J-PAL’s Science for Progress Initiative; together with Ben Jones, she co-directs the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER)’s Innovation Policy working group. Heidi is lead editor of the Journal of Economic Perspectives, and is also a visiting scholar at the Entrepreneurial Management unit at Harvard Business School. Heidi received her AB in mathematics from Dartmouth College in 2003, her MSc in development economics from Oxford University in 2004, and her PhD 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). She has also been recognized for her undergraduate teaching, graduate teaching, and graduate advising.