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| Oliver Williamson Ada Yonath |
Oliver Eaton Williamson who earned his Ph.D. in Economics at Carnegie Mellon, shares this year’s Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences (2009). A well-known author in the area of transaction cost economics, Williamson is currently a Professor of Business Economics and Law at the University of California, Berkley.
“On behalf of Carnegie Mellon University, I congratulate Oliver Williamson on this great honor,” said Carnegie Mellon President Jared Cohon. “We are always pleased to see our alumni succeed, and in this case, Dr. Williamson has achieved international recognition at the highest level. His work in economic governance has been groundbreaking, and this Nobel is well deserved.”
At Carnegie Mellon, Williamson developed focus for his research under the instruction of several academic pioneers who, during the 1960s, were revolutionizing the principles of accepted economic theory. Williamson shares the Nobel Prize with Elinor Ostrom, Professor of Political Science at Indiana University at Bloomington. According to the Nobel Prize Selection Committee, “Both laureates have profoundly enhanced our learning of economic governance.”
Ada Yonath, a post-doctoral fellow at Carnegie Mellon is also named one of three winners of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry this year. Yonath is known for generating X-ray crystallographic images of the ribosome structure as early as the 1970s.
This year, Williamson and Yonath join 16 other Nobel Prize winners with ties to Carnegie Mellon. Carnegie Mellon University recently became one of a few universities in the United States to have several Nobel Prize winners.
