Susan Athey

Susan Athey is the Economics of Technology Professor at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business. Her current research focuses on designing and evaluating digital interventions, the design and analysis of complex experiments, and the intersection of causal inference and artificial intelligence. 

Susan was a founding associate director of the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence, where she currently serves as senior fellow, and she is the founding director of the Golub Capital Social Impact Lab at Stanford GSB. She previously taught at MIT, Stanford, and Harvard. From 2022 to 2024, she took leave from Stanford to serve as chief economist at the US Department of Justice Antitrust Division, where she was a co-leader of the team that drafted the 2023 U.S. Merger Guidelines. 

Susan was the 2023 President of the American Economics Association, where she previously served as vice president and elected member of the Executive Committee. She is the recipient of the John Bates Clark Medal, awarded by the American Economics Association to the economist under 40 who has made the greatest contributions to thought and knowledge. 

She received her bachelor’s degree from Duke University and her PhD from Stanford, and holds an honorary doctorate from Duke University.