1. Abhijit Banerjee is co-founder and co-director of the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab, an MIT based global research center promoting the use of scientific evidence to inform poverty alleviation strategies.
22 Facts About Abhijit Banerjee
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Abhijit Banerjee was born to a Bengali father and a Marathi mother in Mumbai.
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Abhijit Banerjee's father, Dipak Banerjee, was a professor of economics at Presidency College, Calcutta, and received his PhD from the London School of Economics under the supervision of Richard Lipsey.
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Abhijit Banerjee's mother, Nirmala Banerjee was a professor at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta.
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Abhijit Banerjee attended secondary school at South Point School in Kolkata, where he was described as a "brilliant" but "very quiet" student.
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Abhijit Banerjee dropped out of the program after one week, transferring to Presidency College, then an affiliate of the University of Calcutta, to study economics.
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Abhijit Banerjee spent three years at Presidency, receiving a BSc in Economics in 1981.
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Abhijit Banerjee took classes with his father, Dipak Banerjee, in addition to Mihir Rakshit.
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Abhijit Banerjee completed his degree in 1983, and was encouraged by his parents and teachers to apply for PhD programs in economics.
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Abhijit Banerjee applied to Harvard, Stanford, and the University of California, Berkeley, attending the first of these despite no students from Jawaharlal Nehru University having previously been admitted to the university.
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Abhijit Banerjee attended courses with Andreu Mas-Colell, Lawrence Summers, Kala Krishna, Oliver Hart, and Susan Collins, and briefly served as a research assistant to Jeffrey Sachs.
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Abhijit Banerjee is currently the Ford Foundation International Professor of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; he has taught at Harvard University and Princeton University.
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Abhijit Banerjee has been a Guggenheim Fellow and an Alfred P Sloan Fellow.
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Abhijit Banerjee was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2004.
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Abhijit Banerjee served on the Social Sciences jury for the Infosys Prize in 2018.
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Abhijit Banerjee is a co-founder of Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab.
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Abhijit Banerjee wrote a cookbook in 2021, Cooking To Save Your Life, published by Juggernaut.
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Abhijit Banerjee was married to Dr Arundhati Tuli Banerjee, a lecturer of literature at MIT.
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In 2015, Abhijit Banerjee married his co-researcher, MIT professor Esther Duflo; they have two children.
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Abhijit Banerjee was a joint supervisor of Duflo's PhD in economics at MIT in 1999.
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Abhijit Banerjee was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 2019 along with his two co-researchers Esther Duflo and Michael Kremer "for their experimental approach to alleviating global poverty".
22.
Abhijit Banerjee was awarded the Doctor of Letters by the University of Calcutta in January 2020.