Layth C. Alwan in Associate Professor of Business Statistics and Operations Management, Sheldon B. Lubar School of Business, University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. He received a B.A. in mathematics, B.S. in statistics, M.B.A., and PhD in business statistics/operations management, all from the University of Chicago, and an M.S. in computer science from DePaul University. Professor Alwan is an author of many research articles related to statistical process control and business forecasting. He has consulted for many leading companies on statistical issues related to quality, forecasting, and operations/supply chain management applications. On the teaching front, he is focused on engaging and motivating business students on how statistical thinking and data analysis methods have practical importance in business. He is the recipient of several teaching awards, including Business School Teacher of the Year and Executive M.B.A. Outstanding Teacher of the Year.

Laurence Ball is Professor of Economics at Johns Hopkins University. He is a research associate for the National Bureau of Economic Research and has been a visiting scholar at the Central Bank of Norway and the Reserve Bank of Australia. His academic honors include the Houblon-Norman Fellowship (Bank of England), a Professional Fellowship in Monetary Economics (Victoria University of Wellington and Reserve Bank of New Zealand), the NBER Olin Fellowship, and the Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship.

The award-winning illustrator Grady Klein has paired up with the world’s only stand-up economist, Yoram Bauman, PhD, to take the dismal out of the dismal science. From the optimizing individual to game theory to price theory, The Cartoon Introduction to Economics is the most digestible, explicable, and humorous 200-page introduction to microeconomics you’ll ever read.  Bauman has put the “comedy” into “economy” at comedy clubs and universities around the country and around the world (his “Principles of Economics, Translated” is a YouTube cult classic). As an educator at both the university and high school levels, he has learned how to make economics relevant to today’s world and today’s students. As Google’s chief economist, Hal Varian, wrote, “You don’t need a brand-new economics. You just need to see the really cool stuff, the material they didn’t get to when you studied economics.” The Cartoon Introduction to Economics is all about integrating the really cool stuff into an overview of the entire discipline of microeconomics, from decision trees to game trees to taxes and thinking at the margin.

Tyler Cowen is Holbert C. Harris Professor of Economics at George Mason University and Director of the Mercatus Center and the James M. Buchanan Center for Political Economy. He is published widely in economics journals, including the American Economic Review and Journal of Political Economy. With Alex Tabarrok he co-writes the Marginal Revolution blog, often ranked as the #1 economics blog. He is also the author of Discover Your Inner Economist (Dutton, 2007) and numerous other books on economics. He writes regularly for the popular press on economics, including for The New York Times, The Washington Post, Forbes, and The Wilson Quarterly.  University web page: http://economics.gmu.edu/faculty/tcowen.html WATCH: Tyler Cowen at the Economic Bloggers Forum

Bruce A. Craig is Professor of Statistics and Director of the Statistical Consulting Service at Purdue University. He received his B.S. in mathematics and economics from Washington University in St. Louis and his PhD in statistics from the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He is an active member of the American Statistical Association and was chair of its section on Statistical Consulting in 2009. He also is an active member of the Eastern North American Region of the International Biometrics Society and aws elected by the voting membership to the Regional Committee from 2003 to 2006. Professor Craig has served on the editorial board of several statistical journals and has been a member of several data and safety monitoring boards, including Purdue's IRB. Professor Craig's research interests focus on the development of novel statistical methodology to address research questions in the life sciences. Areas of current interest are protein structure determination, diagnostic testing, and animal abundance estimation. In 2005, he was named Purdue University Faculty Scholar.

William M. Duckworth specializes in statistics education, business applications of statistics, and design of experiments. He holds a B.S. and an M.S. from Miami University (Ohio) in mathematics and statistics and a PhD in statistics from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His professional affiliations include the American Statistical Association (ASA), the International Association for Statistical Education (IASE), and the Decision Sciences Institute (DSI). He currently serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Statistics Education and has served as the ASA Editor for Statistics Education Web Content. Professor Duckworth was also a member of the Undergraduate Statistics Education Initiative (USEI), which developed curriculum guidelines for undergraduate programs in statistical science that were officially adopted by the ASA. Professor Duckworth has published research papers and been invited to speak at professional meetings and at company training workshops. During his tenure in the Statistics Department at Iowa State University, his main responsibility was coordinating, teaching, and improving introductory business statistics courses for over one thousand business students a year. He received the Iowa State University Foundation Award for Early Achievement in Teaching, based in part on his improvements to introductory business statistics. Professor Duckworth now teaches business statistics in the College of Business Administration at Creighton University.

Robert C. Feenstra is Professor of Economics at the University of California, Davis. He received his B.A. in 1977 from the University of British Columbia, Canada, and his Ph.D. in economics from MIT in 1981. Feenstra has been teaching international trade at the undergraduate and graduate levels at UC Davis since 1986, where he holds the C. Bryan Cameron Distinguished Chair in International Economics. Feenstra is a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, where he directs the International Trade and Investment research program. He is the author of Offshoring in the Global Economy and Product Variety and the Gains from Trade (MIT Press, 2010). Feenstra received the Bernhard Harms Prize from the Institute for World Economics, Kiel, Germany, in 2006, and delivered the Ohlin Lectures at the Stockholm School of Economics in 2008. He lives in Davis, California, with his wife Gail, and has two grown children: Heather, who is a genetic counselor; and Evan, who recently graduated from Pitzer College.

Kathyrn Graddy is a Professor of Economics at Brandeis University.  She received her BA and BS from Tulane University, her MBA from Columbia University, and her PhD from Princeton University.  She regularly reaches introduction to economics at Brandeis, and her research focuses on the economics of art and culture and industrial organization.

Dr. Jonathan Gruber is a Professor of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he has taught since 1992.  He is also the Director of the Health Care Program at the National Bureau of Economics Research, where he is a research Associate.  He is a co-editor of the Journal of Public Economics and an Associate Editor of the Journal of Health Economics. Dr. Gruber received his B.S. in Economics from MIT and his PH.D. in Economics from Harvard.  He has received and Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Research Fellowship, a FIRST award from the National Institute on Aging, and the Kenneth Arrow Award for the Best Paper in Health Economics in 1994.  He was also one of the 15 scientists nationwide to receive the Presidential Faculty Fellow Award from the National Science Foundation in 1995.  Dr. Gruber was elected to the Institute of Medicine in 2005, and in 2006, he received the American Society of Health Economists’ Inaugural Medial for the best health economist in the nation ages 40 and under.  Dr. Gruber’s research focuses on the areas of public finance and health economics.  He has published more than 125 research articles and has edited 6 research volumes.
 During the 1997-1998 academic year, Dr. Gruber was on leave from MIT, serving as Deputy Assistant Secretary for Economic Policy at the U.S. Treasury Department.  He was a key architect of Massachusetts’ ambitious health reform effort, and in 2006, he became an inaugural member of the Health Connector Board, the main implementing body for the effort.  In that year, he was named the nineteenth-most powerful person in health care in the United States by Modern Healthcare Magazine.  He acted as a consultant on several presidential campaigns and is considered by the Washington Post to be one of the “most influential” health care experts in America.

R.W. Hafer is Professor and Chair of the Department of Economics and Finance at Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville. He served as Research Officer with the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis for ten years. He has published widely on monetary policy and financial markets in academic and non-academic publications, including The Wall Street Journal.

Daniel S. Hamermesh is the Sue Killam Professor in the Foundations of Economics at the University of Texas at Austin and Professor of Labor Economics at the University of Maastricht, the Netherlands.  He received his B.A. from the University of Chicago and his Ph.D. from Yale University. He taught from 1969-73 at Princeton, from 1973-93 at Michigan State, and has held visiting professorships at universities in the United States, Europe, Australia, and Asia.  He is a Fellow of Econometric Society, a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research and the Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA), and past president of the Society of Labor Economists and of the Midwest Economics Association.  He authored Labor Demand and The Economics of Work and Pay, and a wide array of articles in labor economics in the leading general and specialized economics journals.  His research concentrates on time use, labor demand and unusual applications of labor economics (to suicide, sleep and beauty).  He has taught introductory microeconomics since 1968 to more than 14,000 students and has won numerous university awards for his undergraduate teaching.  He is a regular guest-blogger at http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/

Joseph E. Harrington, Jr. is Professor of Economics at Johns Hopkins University. He has served on numerous editorial boards, including the RAND Journal of Economics, Foundations and Trends in Microeconomics, and the Southern Economic Journal. His research has appeared in top journals in a variety of disciplines including economics (e.g., the American Economic Review, Journal of Political Economy, and Games and Economic Behavior), political science (Economics and Politics, Public Choice), sociology (American Journal of Sociology), organizational behavior (Management Science), and psychology (Journal of Mathematical Psychology). He is a co-author of the leading textbook Economics of Regulation and Antitrust, which is currently in its fourth edition.