Bio

Heidi Williams is the Charles R. Schwab Professor of Economics at Stanford University.  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, as well as Co-Chair (with Paul Niehaus) of J-PAL’s Science for Progress Initiative.  She is the Editor of the Journal of Economic Perspectives, and is a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) where she is co-director (with Ben Jones) of the Innovation Policy working group.  At Stanford, she is also Professor, by courtesy, of Law at Stanford Law School and a Senior Fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR).  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 Econometric Society; the recipient of a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship (2015), an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship (2015), and the ASHEcon Medal (2021); and has also been recognized for her undergraduate teaching, graduate teaching, and graduate advising.