Thomas Schelling

Thomas Crombie Schelling (April 14, 1921 – December 13, 2016) was an American economist and professor of foreign policy, national security, nuclear strategy, and arms control at the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland, College Park. He was also co-faculty at the New England Complex Systems Institute.

Schelling was awarded the 2005 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences (shared with Robert Aumann) for "having enhanced our understanding of conflict and cooperation through game theory analysis."

Schelling was born on April 14, 1921, in Oakland, California. He graduated from San Diego High School. He received his bachelor's degree in economics from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1944 and received his PhD in economics from Harvard University in 1951.

Schelling served with the Marshall Plan in Europe, the White House, and the Executive Office of the President from 1948 to 1953. He wrote most of his dissertation on national income behavior working at night while in Europe. He left government to join the economics faculty at Yale University.

In 1956, "he joined the RAND Corporation as an adjunct fellow, becoming a full-time researcher for a year after leaving Yale, and returning to adjunct status through 2002." In 1958 Schelling was appointed professor of economics at Harvard. That same year, he "co-founded the Center for International Affairs, which was [later] renamed the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs."

In 1969, Schelling joined Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government, where he was the Lucius N. Littauer Professor of Political Economy. He was among the "founding fathers" of the "modern" Kennedy School, as he helped to shift the curriculum's emphasis away from administration and more toward leadership.

Between 1994 and 1999, he conducted research at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), in Laxenburg, Austria.

In 1990, he left Harvard and joined the University of Maryland School of Public Policy and the University of Maryland Department of Economics. In 1991, he accepted the presidency of the American Economic Association, an organization of which he was also a Distinguished Fellow.