2007: Eric Stark Maskin (1950-)

The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 2007 (jointly with Leonid Hurwicz and Roger B Myerson)

"for having laid the foundations of mechanism design theory".

Born in New York and raised in New Jersey, Eric Maskin went on to Harvard to study Mathematics, gaining his AB in 1972, AM in 1974 and PhD in 1976. After this he came to Cambridge to take up a yearlong Research Fellowship at Jesus College, and then spent 7 years at MIT before returning to his alma mater to become Professor of Economics in 1985.

In 2000 he moved to Princeton to become the Albert O Hirschman Professor of Social Science in the Institute for Advanced Study and in 2012 returned, again, to Harvard as Adams University Professor.

His first connection to St John’s came in 1987, when he was an Overseas Visiting Fellow; he was later made an Honorary Fellow in 2004. He has held honorary and visiting positions all over the world from his native US to the Far East, and boasts a similarly international array of awards, medals and honorary degrees which reflect the impact his work on economic theory has made.