Elinor Ostrom, born August 7, 1933, is a political economist and professor at both Indiana University and Arizona State University. Ostrom's educational background is in political science, and she received undergraduate, masters and doctoral degrees from the University of California, Los Angeles. Ostrom is also a Research Professor and the Founding Director of the Center for the Study of Institutional Diversity at Arizona State University in Tempe, and she serves as a lead researcher for the Sustainable Agriculture and Natural Resource Management Collaborative Research Support Program. Despite her extensive background, Ostrom is probably best known for being the first, and so far only, woman to win a
Nobel Prize in Economics.
Ostrom's research focuses on market failures surrounding common resources, specifically the tragedy of the commons, and the ways that how societies and communities self-organize in order to mitigate the effects of the tragedy of the commons and manage their resources for long-term sustainable yields. In order to conduct her analyses, Ostrom developed her own methodology known as the institutional analysis and development (IAD) framework.
Elinor Ostrom's complete CV can be found here.
