Heidi Williams (born 1981) is the Charles R. Schwab Professor of Economics at

Stanford University Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California. The campus occupies , among the largest in the United States, and enrolls over 17,000 students. Stanford is conside ...

and Director of Science Policy at the Institute for Progress. She is a graduate of

Dartmouth College Dartmouth College (; ) is a private research university in Hanover, New Hampshire. Established in 1769 by Eleazar Wheelock, it is one of the nine colonial colleges chartered before the American Revolution. Although founded to educate Native ...

, and earned her MSc in development economics from

Oxford University Oxford () is a city in England. It is the county town and only city of Oxfordshire. In 2020, its population was estimated at 151,584. It is north-west of London, south-east of Birmingham and north-east of Bristol. The city is home to the ...

and her PhD in Economics from

Harvard University Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of highe ...

. Prior to Stanford, Williams was an associate professor at the

Massachusetts Institute of Technology The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of th ...

. She is a member of the

National Bureau of Economic Research The National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) is an American private nonprofit research organization "committed to undertaking and disseminating unbiased economic research among public policymakers, business professionals, and the academic c ...

. Williams is an applied micro-economist who works on the causes and consequences of technological change in health care markets. Specifically, she studies economic and policy factors that affect medical innovation, and quantifies the impacts of "missing innovation" that could have been beneficial for human health and medicine. She is most well known for her work on the

Human Genome Project The Human Genome Project (HGP) was an international scientific research project with the goal of determining the base pairs that make up human DNA, and of identifying, mapping and sequencing all of the genes of the human genome from both ...

. In her dissertation research, Williams shows that intellectual property held by the company

Celera Celera is a subsidiary of Quest Diagnostics which focuses on genetic sequencing and related technologies. It was founded in 1998 as a business unit of Applera, spun off into an independent company in 2008, and finally acquired by Quest Diagnostic ...

on human genome sequences had negative consequences for the development of scientific research and genetic tests based on those genes. In some other work, Williams and her co-authors show that pharmaceutical firms under-invest in research in early-stage cancer drugs because they take longer time to get to market, as compared to drugs for late-stage cancer. In 2015, Williams was made a

MacArthur Fellow The MacArthur Fellows Program, also known as the MacArthur Fellowship and commonly but unofficially known as the "Genius Grant", is a prize awarded annually by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation typically to between 20 and 30 indi ...

, a grant given yearly to 25 people around the world to continue work in their fields. Her citation for that award noted: In June 2021, Williams was a co-recipient of the biennial ASHEcon Medal, an award from the American Society of Health Economists for researchers aged 40 and under who have made significant contributions to the field of health economics.

Publications

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References

External links

Heidi Williams bio
at humsci.stanford.edu
Heidi Williams
at economics.mit.edu * {{DEFAULTSORT:Williams, Heidi Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences alumni MacArthur Fellows Fellows of the Econometric Society MIT School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences faculty Dartmouth College alumni American women economists 21st-century American economists 1981 births Living people Alumni of the University of Oxford 21st-century American women