Seema Jayachandran

Seema Jayachandran is a Professor of Economics at Northwestern University. Her research focuses on economic issues in developing countries, including environmental conservation, gender equality, labor markets, health, and education. She is a recipient of a Sloan Research Fellowship, National Science Foundation Early Career Development Award, and the Ecological Society of America's Sustainability Science Award.

Seema currently serves on J-PAL's board of directors and is the chair of J-PAL's gender sector. She is co-editor for the American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, associate editor for the Quarterly Journal of Economics, and co-director of the National Bureau of Economic Research's program in Development Economics. In addition, she writes regularly for the New York Times as a contributor to the Economic View column.

Prior to joining Northwestern, she was a faculty member at Stanford University. She earned a PhD in economics from Harvard University, a master’s degree in physics and philosophy from the University of Oxford where she was a Marshall Scholar, and a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from MIT.