Susan Athey

Timeline

1. 1991–1995

   Duke and Stanford degrees

   She earns a BA in economics, mathematics, and computer science at Duke University in 1991 and a PhD at Stanford Graduate School of Business in 1995. Her doctoral advisors are Paul Milgrom, John Roberts, and Edward Lazear.

2. 1995–2006

   MIT, Stanford, and Harvard

   In 1995, she becomes an assistant professor of economics at MIT. She joins Stanford in 2001, holds the Holbrook Working Professor of Economics chair, and moves to Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences as a professor of economics in July 2006.

3. 2007–2012

   Clark Medal and academy elections

   She receives the John Bates Clark Medal in 2007. Election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences follows in 2008, and she becomes a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 2012.

4. 2013

   Professor at Stanford GSB

   In 2013, she returns to Stanford as a professor at the Graduate School of Business. Her chief economist role at Microsoft ends in 2013; work with Bing’s randomized experiments helps shape her interest in combining machine learning with methods for measuring causal effects.

5. 2016

   Trees for causal effects

   With Guido W. Imbens, she publishes “Recursive Partitioning for Heterogeneous Causal Effects” in 2016. The method uses regression trees to find groups with different treatment effects, with separate samples used to form the groups and estimate their effects.

6. 2019

   Generalized random forests

   In 2019, she publishes “Generalized Random Forests” with Julie Tibshirani and Stefan Wager in the Annals of Statistics. The work extends random forests to statistical tasks such as quantile regression and treatment-effect estimation, and provides methods for confidence intervals. Its software implementation, grf, is available for R and C++.

7. 2019

   Golub Capital Social Impact Lab

   In 2019, she leads Stanford GSB’s new Golub Capital Social Impact Lab as its initial faculty director. The lab brings academics, staff, and students together to help social sector organizations test digital tools and measure their effects.

8. 2022–2024

   Chief economist at Justice

   From 2022 to 2024, she takes leave from Stanford to serve as chief economist of the US Department of Justice Antitrust Division. She also serves as president of the American Economic Association in 2023.

9. 2025

   HAI and foundation models

   In 2025, she serves as a senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence. In May 2025, she publishes “Estimating Wage Disparities Using Foundation Models” with Keyon Vafa and David M. Blei. The paper develops methods to fine-tune foundation models for statistical estimation and uses career histories to study the gender wage gap.

10. As of October 2026

    Professor and lab director

    As of October 2026, she is the Economics of Technology Professor at Stanford Graduate School of Business and founding director of its Golub Capital Social Impact Lab. Her lab uses machine learning to estimate how interventions affect different people, and applies bandit algorithms and reinforcement learning to personalize digital services.