March 23, 2026
Alumni Updates: Winter/Spring 2026
From award-winning research to leadership in higher education, Harvard Griffin GSAS alumni are shaping the future of every field. Explore the latest achievements, appointments, and accolades from our graduate community around the world.
A Nobel for Innovation, "Creative Destruction"
Philippe Aghion, PhD ’87, joined colleagues Peter Howitt and Joel Mokyr as winners of the 2025 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel “for having explained innovation-driven economic growth.”It’s a world where new entrants and new talents constantly challenge existing ones,” explained Aghion. “They expect that if they innovate, they will get innovation rents—extra earnings firms get from an advantage others can’t yet copy.” A longtime member of the Harvard economics faculty, now a professor at the Collège de France and NSEAD, Paris, Aghion hopes his insights will help policymakers better understand the dynamics of “creative destruction,” as well as the need to manage that process so that incumbent firms don’t stifle new innovations—and workers aren’t left out in the cold.
Read more: How Growth Happens
More Alumni News
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Gbemisola Abiola, PhD ’23, African and African-American studies, was selected for the Empowered Leader Program. Run by the Women’s Impact Alliance, the program combines executive coaching, trusted peer-to-peer forums, and leaderlab workshops to strengthen the leadership capacity of the next generation of women driving change. Participants are chosen based on the scope of their impact, their potential to accelerate change, and their commitment to self-development. | Image
Nobel laureate Abhijit Banerjee, PhD ’88, economics, will join the University of Zurich’s (UZH) Faculty of Business, Economics and Informatics in July 2026. Banerjee will hold an endowed professorship, studying how policies in areas such as education, poverty, and health care can drive social change, and will co-lead the Lemann Centre for Development, Education and Public Policy, an initiative backed by a CHF 26 million donation from the Lemann Foundation.
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Ray Jayawardhana, PhD ’00, astronomy, an accomplished academic leader and renowned astrophysicist who currently serves as provost of Johns Hopkins University, was named the next president of the California Institute of Technology, the 10th in the school’s 105-year history. Jayawardhana will assume his new position on July 1, 2026.
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Joanne Martin, PhD ’77, social psychology, a 2002 Centennial Medalist, was cited as a Pioneer of the Stanford Graduate School of Business (GSB) on the occasion of the school’s centennial. The first woman to receive an endowed chair at Stanford GSB, Martin studies organizations as cultures, using qualitative analysis alongside quantitative research. She has also been honored by the Organizational Theory Division of the Academy of Management.
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John Preskill, PhD ’80, physics, of the California Institute of Technology, was honored with the Quantum World Congress Academic Pioneer in Quantum Award for 2025, recognizing his pioneering work on fault-tolerant quantum computing protocols that enable reliable operation of noisy quantum devices. Since 1983, Preskill has led research into quantum error correction, attracting a generation of young scientist-leaders. | Image
Rhine Samajdar, PhD ’22, physics, was named one of 12 recipients of the 2025 Boeing Quantum Creators Prize. The award recognizes early-career researchers whose work contributes new ideas to the fast-growing field of quantum information science and engineering. Samajdar, now a postdoctoral fellow at Princeton University, conducts research at the interface of quantum information science and condensed matter physics.
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Jack Thorne, PhD ’12, mathematics, was named one of the Fellows of the Academy for the Mathematical Sciences in the United Kingdom. Thorne will join an inaugural cohort of 100 fellows that brings together the UK’s strongest mathematicians across academia, education, business, industry, and government to help solve some of the nation’s biggest challenges.
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Ekaterina Zhuravskaya, PhD ’99, economics, received an honorary doctor of science degree from the University of Warwick in the United Kingdom. An economist at the Paris School of Economics and EHESS and co-editor of the American Economic Review, Zhuravskaya explores how political institutions, media, and economic policies shape societies, with a focus on development, conflict, and media.
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