I was born on December 22, 1941 in the Carlton suburb of Nottingham in England in the middle of the Second World War. My father, William Stanley Whittingham, was a civil engineer and the first in the family to go to college, and my mother Dorothy Mary (née Findley) was a chemist before marriage. My…

Biography* My family, childhood and education I was born in 1942 in Lausanne, Switzerland, a small town along Lake Leman where I started elementary school. My father was a police commissioner with positions in different cities. When I was six years old, my family moved to Cully, a superb village in the vineyards along the…

Childhood I was born in Jena, Germany, in July 1922, to American parents, Erwin Ramsdell Goodenough and Helen Miriam (Lewis) Goodenough. My father was working on his D. Phil. dissertation on the Church Fathers at Oxford University at the time of my birth. My parents lived in Oxford, England, for three years and my father…

I was born November 23, 1957 in Jamaica, New York City, to William George and Nancy Priscilla (Horn) Kaelin. My mother’s first pregnancy ended in a miscarriage. The obstetrician who delivered me was a friend of my mother’s family. He initially thought I was stillborn and lamented that such obstetrical problems seemed to disproportionately affect his…

Didier Queloz is a professor of physics at the University of Cambridge’s Cavendish Laboratory and professor of astronomy at the University of Geneva (part time). He is one of the originators of the “exoplanet revolution” in astrophysics. In 1995, as part of his PhD, he and his supervisor announced the first discovery of a giant…

Michael Kremer did not submit a biography.

My impression is that each of us is born with distinct personal char­acteristics. It seems quite observable in our three daughters, and I think I see it in myself. I believe I was born to be a physicist of the kind who may be a little weak on the mathematics but has some sort of…

I was born in 1972 at the Port Royal hospital, the “baby factory” of Paris. I grew up with my parents, Violaine Duflo (a pediatrician) and Michel Duflo (a math professor) in Asnières, a western suburb of Paris. I went to the local public schools until grade 11, and transferred to Henri IV, a magnet…

An accidental economist: a brief history A series of accidents, mostly fortunate, made me the human being and economist that I am. It started with the accident of my birth, to a couple who were both economists. This, in my generation, was already a minor miracle – in the mid 1950s my mother somehow managed…

I was born 14 may 1954, and my childhood in Carnforth, Lancashire was idyllic. At the time I would have said it was unremarkable, as are most things when not viewed by comparison. The near-total freedom I enjoyed seemed perfectly natural. The town was an unpretentious rail­way town in North Lancashire, England. My father was…