Parag A. Pathak

BOSTON - Parag A. Pathak will earn his Ph.D. in Business Economics at Commencement today after four years of study at both Harvard Business School (HBS) and Harvard University’s Department of Economics. But this isn’t the only feather in his cap. He has recently been elected a Junior Fellow in Harvard’s very select and prestigious Society of Fellows—the first person from any HBS doctoral program to be so honored.

Organized in 1933 under the terms of a gift from A. Lawrence Lowell, then President Emeritus of Harvard University, the Society provides outstanding young scholars from all fields of study with a three-year fellowship at Harvard. According to the Society, Junior Fellows “must be persons of exceptional ability, originality, and resourcefulness, and should be of the highest caliber of intellectual achievement….They are selected for their resourcefulness, initiative, and intellectual curiosity, and because their work holds exceptional promise.”

The number of Junior Fellows at any one time is normally limited to thirty, and usually ten are chosen each year by means of a rigorous selection process conducted by the Society’s fourteen Senior Fellows, who administer the organization with Harvard’s President and the Dean of its Faculty of Arts and Sciences.

Under the guidance of his primary advisor, Alvin E. Roth, the George Gund Professor of Economics and Business Administration at HBS, Pathak has focused on the design of markets, in particular improving systems for matching thousands of students with the public elementary and high schools of their choice in Boston and New York. During his doctoral studies, Pathak has also conducted research in finance, microeconomic theory, and public economics.

A summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Harvard College, Pathak received both a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in applied mathematics and economics in 2002. As a graduate student, he has won numerous forms of recognition for academic excellence, including the State Farm Companies Doctoral Dissertation Award for his thesis, “Essays on Market Design”; the George S. Dively Award for Outstanding Pre-Dissertation Research; and a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship.

After completing his tenure as a Junior Fellow, Pathak will join the MIT Economics Department as an assistant professor.