Department Awards

The Department of Economics honors students and faculty with awards for scholarship and teaching.

Graduate Students

Walter Heller Memorial Prize (Best Third-Year Paper)

This award is given in memory of Professor Walter Perrin Heller (1942–2001) and provides formal recognition to a graduate student who has shown the most promise for a future career in research. Professor Heller was a leading twentieth-century economic theorist and an early member of the UC San Diego faculty from 1974 to 2001. For 2008–09 the award was given to two students:

Aislinn Bohren
“Information-Processing Uncertainty in Social Learning”
Doungdao Mahakitsiri
“Endogenous Free Trade Agreements: An Impact on the Intensive and Extensive Margins of Trade”

Teaching Assistance Excellence

The department recognizes graduate students who demonstrate great efforts in their teaching as evidenced by glowing teaching evaluations from undergraduates, graduate peers, and their faculty supervisors. Nominations are solicited from the faculty, and awards are made by the graduate committee. Each of the recipients showed clear commitment to the teaching mission of UC San Diego.

Ben Backes
Undergraduate teaching
Charles Lin
Undergraduate teaching
Aren Megerdichian
Undergraduate teaching
Aaron Schroeder
Undergraduate teaching
Jaime Thomas
Undergraduate teaching
Bryan Tomlin
Graduate teaching
(graduate course)
Li Zhou
Undergraduate teaching

Undergraduate Students

The Department of Economics grants three annual awards to graduating seniors from our three majors: economics, management science, and joint mathematics-economics. Recipients are chosen by faculty vote from a pool of top students in the graduating class of each major. The award is mentioned at their college commencement ceremonies, and awardees receive a total cash award of $200 from the department and the UCSD Alumni Association.

Seymour Harris Award for Excellence in Economics
Recipient: Jessica Lin

This award commemorates Seymour E. Harris, a prominent government advisor from the 1940s to the 1960s. He was a noted member of the Harvard University economics faculty and the founding chair of UC San Diego’s Department of Economics.

Joel Dean Award for Excellence in Management Science
Recipient: Siqian (Yindsey) Wang

This award commemorates Joel Dean, a prominent management scientist who was also a noted faculty member of the business school at Columbia University. He was a visiting professor at UC San Diego’s Department of Economics throughout the 1970s and was one of the pioneers of our management science major.