James J. Heckman is the Henry Schultz Distinguished Service Professor in Economics at the University of Chicago where he is also the Director of the Center for the Economics of Human Development. Much of his work has focused on understanding the origins of major social and economic problems related to inequality, social mobility, discrimination, skill formation and regulation, and devising and evaluating alternative strategies for addressing those problems. In 2000, he shared the Nobel Prize in Economics for his work on the microeconometrics of diversity and heterogeneity and for establishing a sound causal basis for public policy evaluation. He has also received numerous other awards for his work and was made a Distinguished Fellow of the American Economic Association in 2017.