Alvin E. Roth was born on December 18, 1951 in New York City. He studied at Columbia University and later got his PHD from Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, in 1974. Before moving to Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1998, Roth worked at the University of Illinois and the University of Pittsburgh. He returned to Stanford University in 2012. Alvin Roth is married with two children. His elder son, Aaron Roth, is a professor of computer science at the University of Pennsylvania. As of 2015, his younger son, Ben Roth, is an economics graduate student at MIT.

   

As the Craig and Susan McCaw professor of economics at Stanford University and the Gund professor of economics and business administration emeritus at Harvard University, Roth won the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences jointly with Lloyd Shapley in 2012. He has significant contribution to the fields of game theory, market design and experimental economics. Moreover, Roth is known for his emphasis on applying economic theory to solutions for "real-world" problems. In particular, Roth has developed systems for matching doctors with hospitals, school children with schools, and organ donors with patients. He helped redesign mechanisms for selecting medical residents, New York City high schools and Boston primary schools. Describing the dynamism of market design, Roth suggests that “As the conditions of the market change, the behavior of people change and that causes old rules to be discarded and new rules to be created”.

As a former member if the College of Business faculty at UIUC, Roth returned to Illinois to present his special lecture that provided excellent insight into his research. In his speech, he demonstrated the new way for researchers collaborating with practitioners to successfully co-produce significant knowledge, as well as the specific actions that are necessary to ensure effective knowledge transfer from academia to the practitioner world.

The following link is the lecture: https://business.illinois.edu/100/alvin-roth/

I look forward to gaining more and more understanding Roth’s work in the coming semester as I think it is truly interesting to learn build bridges between economic theoretical theories and our practical world.