Social and behavioral scientists

Nawazish Mirza

Nawazish Mirza (Mirza Nawazish Elahi) is a French-based finance economist and full professor at Excelia Business School in La Rochelle, researching green finance and ESG.

Neil Adger

W. Neil Adger, born in Ballymena, Northern Ireland, in 1964, is a professor of human geography at the University of Exeter known for work on climate change adaptation.

Neil Smelser

Neil Smelser (1930–2017) was an American sociologist and university administrator at UC Berkeley, known for his 1962 Theory of Collective Behavior and as a foundational figure in economic sociology.

Niall Ferguson, British-American historian (born 1964), Hoover Institution senior fellow and Belfer Center faculty fellow; author of The Pity of War, Empire, The Ascent of Money, Civilization, and the authorized Kissinger biography; knighted 2024.

Sep 20, 2026

Nicholas A. Christakis

Nicholas A. Christakis is a Yale social scientist and physician, a Sterling Professor there since 2018, known for studies of how obesity and smoking spread through social networks.

Oct 22, 2026

Nicholas Adontz

Nicholas Adontz (Նիկողայոս Ադոնց), born Nikoghayos Ter-Avetikian, was an Armenian historian and Byzantinist best known for his landmark study Armenia in the Period of Justinian.

Nicholas Bloom

Nicholas Bloom is a British-American economist and Stanford professor known for work on uncertainty shocks, the Economic Policy Uncertainty index, and a landmark hybrid remote-work trial.

Nicholas M. Odhiambo

Nicholas M. Odhiambo is a Kenyan-born South African economist and full professor at the University of South Africa, known for research on growth and financial development in Africa.

Nick Pidgeon

Nick Pidgeon is a British environmental psychologist and Professor at Cardiff University, known for research on risk perception, climate and energy policy engagement, and an MBE in 2014.

Nicola Gennaioli

Nicola Gennaioli is an economist and Full Professor of Finance at Bocconi University in Milan, best known for the diagnostic expectations framework and salience theory developed with Pedro Bordalo and Andrei Shleifer.

Nicola Susan Clayton

Nicola Susan Clayton, also known as Nicola S. Clayton, is a British experimental psychologist at Cambridge known for research on memory and planning in scrub jays.

Niklas Luhmann

Niklas Luhmann (1927–1998) was a German sociologist, the first professor of the University of Bielefeld, known for systems theory describing society as self-reproducing communication and for his controversy with Jürgen Habermas.

Nirmalya Kumar

Nirmalya Kumar is a marketing scholar and business executive, a Visiting Professor at the Indian School of Business who served on the Tata Sons Group Executive Council from 2013 to 2016.

Noriaki Kano

Noriaki Kano (狩野紀昭), born 1940, is a Japanese quality-management scholar, professor emeritus of Tokyo University of Science, and creator of the Kano model of customer satisfaction.

Norma Graham

Norma Graham (Norma Van Surdam Graham, born 1944) is an American experimental psychologist and Centennial Professor Emerita at Columbia University, elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1998.

Norman Davies

Norman Davies (born 1939, Bolton) is a British-Polish historian, author of God's Playground, Europe: A History, The Isles, and Europe at War; emeritus professor at UCL-SSEES, British Academy Fellow, holder of Poland's Order of the White Eagle.

Norman Finkelstein

Norman G. Finkelstein (born 1953), American political scientist and son of Holocaust survivors, author of The Holocaust Industry and Beyond Chutzpah; known for the Dershowitz feud and 2007 DePaul tenure denial, distinct from writer Norman H. Finkelstein and the poet Norman Finkelstein.

Norman Schofield

Norman Schofield (1944–2019) was a British-born political economist who held the Taussig chair at Washington University in St. Louis and proved the McKelvey–Schofield chaos theorems on majority-rule voting instability.

Norman V. Loayza

Norman V. Loayza is a Peruvian economist who directs the Policy Indicators Group at the World Bank, led the World Development Report 2014, and researches the informal sector.

Nouriel Roubini

Nouriel Roubini (Dr Doom) is an Iranian-born American economist, NYU Stern professor emeritus known for warning of the 2007-09 global financial crisis in a September 2006 IMF talk, ex-White House CEA and Treasury staffer, and founder of RGE Monitor.

Oded Galor

Oded Galor is an economist at Brown University, the Herbert H. Goldberger Professor, who founded Unified Growth Theory and wrote The Journey of Humanity, published in 31 languages.

Odin W. Anderson

Odin W. Anderson (Odin Waldemar Anderson, 1914–2003) was an American health services researcher and medical sociologist known for studies of health insurance and Blue Cross.

Oguzhan Cepni

Oguzhan Cepni is a monetary economist at the Central Bank of the UAE who earned a 2023 PhD from Copenhagen Business School and researches climate finance and forecasting.

Oldřich Vašíček

Oldřich Vašíček is a Czech-born mathematician in the United States whose 1977 Vasicek interest rate model shaped rate derivatives, and whose credit risk work fed the Basel II Accord.

Oleg Itskhoki

Oleg Itskhoki, born 1983 in Moscow, is a Russian-born American economist who is the Slusky Family Professor at Harvard and won the 2022 John Bates Clark Medal.

Olga Francesca Linares

Olga Francesca Linares (1936–2014) was a Panamanian anthropologist and tropical ecologist at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, its first archaeologist, elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1992.

Oliver Bruce Linton

Oliver Bruce Linton is a British econometrician and Professor of Political Economy at the University of Cambridge, best known for developing nonparametric and semiparametric estimation methods.

Oliver E. Williamson

Oliver E. Williamson (1932–2020) was an American economist at the University of California, Berkeley, a founding father of transaction cost economics who shared the 2009 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences.

Oliver Hart (economist)

Sir Oliver Hart, born in London in 1948, is a Harvard economist who shared the 2016 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for contributions to contract theory.