Nicholas Stern is the IG Patel Professor of Economics and Government, Chairman of the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment and Head of the India Observatory at the London School of Economics. He is President of the British Academy (from July 2013), and was elected Fellow of the Royal Society (June 2014). Professor Stern has held academic appointments in the UK at Oxford, Warwick and the LSE and abroad including at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Ecole Polytechnique and the Collège de France in Paris, the Indian Statistical Institute in Bangalore and Delhi, and the People’s University of China in Beijing.

He was Chief Economist of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, 1994-1999, and Chief Economist and Senior Vice President at the World Bank, 2000-2003. He was Second Permanent Secretary to Her Majesty’s Treasury from 2003-2005; Director of Policy and Research for the Prime Minister’s Commission for Africa from 2004-2005; Head of the Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change, published in 2006; Head of the Government Economic Service from 2003-2007; and President of the British Academy from 2013-2017. He was knighted for services to economics in 2004, made a cross-bench life peer as Baron Stern of Brentford in 2007, and made Companion of Honour in 2017 He has published more than 15 books and 100 articles, including Why are We Waiting? The Logic, Urgency and Promise of Tackling Climate Change. His most recent book ( with Himanshu and Peter Lanjouw) is How lives change: Palanpur, India and development economics (OUP, 2018).