AMARTYA K. SEN

Amartya Sen is Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, UK, and Lamont University Professor Emeritus at Harvard University. He has served as President of the Econometric Society, the Indian Economic Association, the American Economic Association and the International Economic Association. He is also Honorary President of OXFAM.

Born in Santiniketan, India, in 1933, Amartya Sen studied at Presidency College in Calcutta India, and at Trinity College, Cambridge. He is an Indian citizen. Before joining Harvard in 1987, he was the Drummond Professor of Political Economy at Oxford University in England and a Fellow of All Souls College at Oxford from 1980 and Professor of Economics at Oxford in the 1977-80 period. Between 1971 and 1977, he was Professor of Economics at the London School of Economics. Prior to that he was Professor of Economics at Delhi University.

Professor Sen has published a number of books as well as articles in various journals of economics, philosophy, politics and decision theory. His books have been translated into many languages and include Collective Choice (1970), On Economic Inequality (1973, 1977), On Ethics and Economics (1987), Choice, Welfare and the Measurement (1982), Resources, Values and Development (1984), The Standard of Living (1987), Inequality Reexamined (1992), and Development as Freedom (1999), among others.

His research has ranged over a number of fields in economics and philosophy, including social choice theory, welfare economics, theory of measurement, development economics, and moral and political philosophy. He has a forthcoming book, Freedom, Rationality and Social Choice. He is currently working on the rationality of choice and behavior, and also on objectivity of knowledge.

He is a Fellow of the British Academy and of the Econometric Society, as well as a Foreign Honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has received honorary doctorates (more than forty) from major universities in North America, Europe and Asia. Sen has received various honors, including the "Bharat Ratna" (the highest honor awarded by the President of India). Among the awards he has received are the Frank E. Seidman Distinguished Award in Political Economy, the Senator Giovanni Agnelli International Prize in Ethics, the Alan Shawn Feinstein World Hunger Award, the Jean Mayer Global Citizenship Award, and the Nobel Prize in Economics.