Social and behavioral scientists

Laura Díaz Anadón

Laura Díaz Anadón is a Spanish and American climate change and energy policy economist who has held Cambridge's chair of climate change policy since 2017 and directs CEENRG.

Laura Mero is an American transportation human-factors research psychologist on the Federal Highway Administration's Human Factors Team at the Turner-Fairbank Highway Research Center, who received the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers in 2025.

Laura Schulz

Laura Schulz is a cognitive scientist and professor at MIT whose research shows that young children learn like scientists, forming hypotheses, testing them against evidence, and revising them.

Laura T. Starks

Laura T. Starks is an American finance scholar and professor at the University of Texas at Austin, known for research on institutional investors and sustainable finance.

Laurence Ball

Laurence Ball is an American macroeconomist, professor at Johns Hopkins University since 1994, known for work on inflation, unemployment, and monetary policy, including the 4% inflation target case.

Laurence C. Baker

Laurence C. Baker is an American health economist at Stanford University School of Medicine who studies the organization and economic performance of the United States health care system.

Laurence Dudley Stamp

Laurence Dudley Stamp, known as Sir Dudley Stamp, was a British geographer who directed the 1930s Land Utilisation Survey of Britain, mobilizing some 250,000 volunteers to map land use.

Laurence Kotlikoff

Laurence Kotlikoff is an American economist, the William Fairfield Warren Professor at Boston University, known for co-inventing generational accounting and for fiscal gap estimates far above official US debt.

Laurie R. Santos

Laurie R. Santos is a Yale psychologist whose research moved from how monkeys think to the science of happiness, including Yale's most popular course and The Happiness Lab podcast.

Lawrence Carter (sociologist)

Lawrence Carter, known as Larry, was an American sociologist and professor at the University of Oregon, co-author of the Lee-Carter mortality forecasting model used by the Census Bureau.

Lawrence D. Bobo

Lawrence D. Bobo is an American sociologist, the W. E. B. Du Bois Professor at Harvard, known for his group position theory of racial prejudice and studies of public opinion.

Lawrence F. Katz

Lawrence F. Katz (born 1959) is an American labor economist, the Elisabeth Allison Professor at Harvard and editor of The Quarterly Journal of Economics, known for research on wage inequality.

Lawrence J. Christiano

Lawrence J. Christiano is an American macroeconomist, the Alfred W. Chase Professor at Northwestern University, best known for the 2005 CEE model of nominal rigidities.

Lawrence Kahn

Lawrence M. Kahn is an American labor economist, emeritus professor at Cornell University's ILR School, known for studies of wage inequality and the gender pay gap.

Lawrence Summers

Lawrence H. Summers, American economist; 71st US Treasury Secretary (1999-2001), World Bank Chief Economist, Harvard president, Obama NEC director; 1993 Clark Medalist; later left Harvard over Epstein ties.

Lee K. Cerveny

Lee K. Cerveny is a research social scientist and team leader with the USDA Forest Service's Pacific Northwest Research Station, awarded the Presidential Early Career Award in 2009.

Lee Ross

Lee David Ross (1942–2021) was a Canadian-born social psychologist at Stanford University for 52 years who named the fundamental attribution error and applied bias research to peace negotiations in Northern Ireland and the Middle East.

Leo Hurvich

Leo Hurvich (1910–2009) was an American experimental psychologist who, with his wife Dorothea Jameson, built the first comprehensive quantitative model of color vision at the University of Pennsylvania.

Leo Postman

Leo Postman (1918–2004) was an American experimental psychologist and UC Berkeley professor known for research on human memory and for building modern interference theory of forgetting.

Leon Festinger

Leon Festinger (1919–1989) was an American social psychologist who trained under Kurt Lewin, taught at MIT, Michigan, Minnesota, and Stanford, and created the theory of cognitive dissonance.

Léon Walras

Léon Walras (1834–1910) was a French mathematical economist, professor at Lausanne from 1871 to 1892, whose Éléments d'économie politique pure (1874–77) built the first general equilibrium theory.

Leonard Carmichael

Leonard Carmichael (1898–1973) was an American experimental psychologist known for research on the development of behavior in embryonic and larval animals, and later president of Tufts University and Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution.

Leonardo Gambacorta

Leonardo Gambacorta is an Italian economist who heads the Emerging Markets unit at the Bank for International Settlements in Basel, researching monetary policy, bank capital, fintech, and artificial intelligence.

Leonid Hurwicz

Leonid Hurwicz was an American economist at the University of Minnesota who founded mechanism design theory, winning the 2007 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences at age 90.

Leopold Jaroslav Pospisil

Leopold Jaroslav Pospisil (1923–2021) was a Czech-born American legal anthropologist at Yale, a co-founder of the anthropology of law and the theory of legal pluralism.

Lera Boroditsky

Lera Boroditsky is a cognitive psychologist and professor at the University of California, San Diego, known for experiments on how language shapes habitual thought about time and color.

Lesley Head

Lesley Head is an Australian geographer whose research centers on human-environment relations, especially humans and plants; she is an emeritus professor at the University of Melbourne and former president of the Australian Academy of the Humanities.

Leslie Spier

Leslie Spier (1893–1961) was an American anthropologist known for ethnographic studies of American Indian peoples of the Plains, the Southwest, and the Pacific Northwest, and professor at the University of New Mexico from 1939 to 1955.

Lester Russell Brown

Lester Russell Brown (born 1934) is an American environmental analyst who founded the Worldwatch Institute in 1974 and the Earth Policy Institute in 2001, publishing 54 books.