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Fryer Named Professor of Economics at Harvard
Cambridge, Mass. - May 7, 2008 - Roland Fryer, a scholar of U.S. racial inequality who is widely regarded as a rising star in the field of economics, has been named professor of economics in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University.
Fryer, 29, was previously assistant professor of economics at Harvard, where he has been on the faculty since 2006.
"In a short period of time, Roland Fryer has proven to be one of the leading voices on social and racial inequality in the world," says David Cutler, divisional dean for the social sciences in FAS. "Through his expert application of quantitative and theoretical methods in the analysis of socioeconomic and racial disparities, he will be a continued asset to Harvard and to scholars everywhere."
Fryer has served as the chief equality officer for the New York City Public Schools since 2007. There, he has designed and initiated several innovative new policies, including a series of incentives to motivate elementary and middle school children to perform well on standardized tests. He has also designed similar experiments in other cities that encourage poor and minority children to read books and to participate in SAT preparation classes.
Through his work, Fryer has focused on race, inequality and education through a data-driven, economic lens. He has demonstrated how tension increases with education, along with potential for social and geographic mobility, among individuals in poor and segregated communities. He has also illustrated the ways that in some communities, educational underinvestment can signify peer acceptance, while academic success, or behaviors that might lead to higher pay or professional status, can lead to rejection from the group.
Other research has analyzed possible reasons for differences in life expectancy of blacks as compared to whites. Fryer theorizes that increased risk of cardiovascular disease may be due to salt sensitivity among African Americans, which leads to hypertension. A possible reason for this salt sensitivity may be that during the slave trade, when individuals were forced to endure the long and difficult journey across the ocean, those with a higher salt sensitivity were more likely retain water, and not to expire due to dehydration. Fryer has also investigated wage patterns among graduates of historically black colleges and universities as compared to institutions that are traditionally white, as well as interracial marriage patterns.
In a study published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics in 2004, Fryer analyzed changing patterns of first names among black and white children in California since the 1960s, when, due to the rise of the Black Power movement, blacks began adopting increasingly distinctive names. While the names provide an indicator of racial identity and socioeconomic background, there was not a correlation between distinctively black names and job market success.
Fryer received his Ph.D. in economics from Pennsylvania State University in 2002 and his B.A. in economics from the University of Texas at Arlington.
He has been an associate director of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research since 2006. He has been a faculty associate for the Institute for Quantitative Social Sciences since 2006 and a faculty research fellow for the National Bureau of Economic Research since 2003.
Prior to becoming assistant professor of economics, he was a junior fellow with the Harvard Society of Fellows from 2003 to 2006. Between 2001 and 2003 he was a post-doctoral fellow with the National Science Foundation and a doctoral fellow with the American Bar Foundation.
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