Heidi Williams ’03 awarded MacArthur grant

Dartmouth alumna Heidi Williams ’03 was named a 2015 MacArthur Fellow, one of 24 grant recipients.

The grant — commonly nicknamed the “genius grant” — is only given to nominees “who show exceptional creativity in their work and the prospect for still more in the future,” according to the MacArthur Foundation website.

Williams, who graduated from the College with a major in mathematics and is now an assistant economics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, will receive $625,000 in quarterly installments over the course of five years.

At the College, Williams became interested in medical technologies, which led to her current area of research: the effects of patent law on medical innovation. Williams has been working in her post at the MIT economics department since 2011.

When she first heard she had won the MacArthur Fellowship, Williams said she was speechless.

“I’m very early in my career, and having other people express confidence in my work this early on, I am so grateful,” she said.

Williams said she is interested in what drives health care policy, as well as the changes in mortality rates over the past few decades.

“If you had a heart attack in the ’70s, you wouldn’t have the same survival rate as you do today. That’s largely driven by improvements in medical technologies,” she said.

In her current research, Williams said she aims to explore the relationship between society and the technological advances it produces.

“I want to know whether we’re getting the right technologies, the most socially valuable ones,” she said.

Williams said she enjoys many aspects of her work, such as finding new ways to construct data sets. For her, economics provides a point of entry into understanding how public policy relates to health care.

She said that this work is rewarding, even when the connection is not immediately clear or the data present challenges.

“You have the important ideas, but you can really struggle to find ways to find the right data sets,” she said. “You don’t have the technologies or methodologies, or you don’t have the data. The hardest part is trying to find matches between data and methodology.”

After graduating with her Bachelor’s degree from Dartmouth in 2003, Williams completed a Master’s degree at the University of Oxford.

She then worked at the National Bureau of Economic Research before returning to school and obtaining her Ph.D. from Harvard University in 2010.

As a math major, Williams spent much of her time working closely with mathematics professor Dorothy Wallace. While Williams was not officially affiliated with the economics department at the College, she was able to work with many of the faculty in the department.

“I really enjoyed the opportunity to work closely with faculty and do research with them,” she said.

She said working with faculty provided her with a number of opportunities she would not have received otherwise.

Economics professor Christopher Snyder worked with Williams after she graduated from the College, when she was a research assistant for Harvard economics professor Michael Kremer. The three are currently collaborating on a working paper on vaccines.

“We’ve kept in touch, and we’re good friends,” Snyder said of Williams.

Snyder teaches an economics course at the College called “Competition and Strategy,” which focuses on the economics of businesses and what makes them innovative. He said he teaches Williams’ research in this course.

“That’s what some of her research touches on — it’s innovation and growth and firms’ incentives to innovate. Her work is some of the best work on those questions,” Synder said.

Snyder also regularly recommends his best students to work as research assistants for Williams.

Economics professor Douglas Staiger advised Williams’ in an independent study in economics she completed her senior year, despite having no prior experience in the department.

“We met once a week and talked economics, and she just was absorbed. She had really strong math skills, and could just understand and pick up really deep, complex ideas really quickly,” he said.

Economics professor Jonathan Skinner taught a graduate class at Harvard in 2009.

“By that time, it was clear that great things were going to come, because she had already established herself as an outstanding student,” Skinner said.

Snyder, Staiger and Skinner each described Williams as smart, kind and generous.

“She’s very well-spoken, and very clear, and is very quick to respond if there are questions,” Skinner said. “She has this tremendous ability to come up with answers that other people wouldn’t have thought of, or ideas that are really outstanding, that even if lots of smart people had lots of time to think of it, they wouldn’t have thought of it.”

While the three professors all expressed that they were not shocked by the announcement, Staiger and Skinner both noted that Williams is younger than the typical MacArthur grant recipient.

“If you would’ve asked me, who under 40 among the economists I would think were likely MacArthur winners, [Williams] would’ve been top of my list,” Staiger said.

Williams, who just had her first child, said she has not had time to think about how she will use the grant money. She said she is looking forward to thinking about how to spend the money once she has more free time.