United States-based Nobel laureates Esther Duflo and Abhijit Banerjee will soon join the University of Zurich, where they will establish a new center for development economics, the institution said on Friday, October 10. The University of Zurich (UZH) said the married couple, who currently work at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), would join its economics faculty from July next year.
The statement made no mention of why the pair, who won the 2019 Nobel Economics Prize alongside Michael Kremer for their “experimental approach to alleviating global poverty,” had decided to leave. Yet they will be moving to Switzerland at a time when experts are warning that US President Donald Trump’s cuts to research funding and attacks on universities’ academic freedoms could lead to a brain drain, with some countries trying to attract US scientists.
Duflo, an American-French dual national, co-signed an op-ed in Le Monde back in March denouncing “unprecedented attacks” on US science.
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