Showing posts with label honorary degree. Show all posts
Showing posts with label honorary degree. Show all posts

Friday, October 2, 2015

Cap and Gown at Exeter

When I was at Exeter University in July, I not only attended a conference on market design, but also put on a cap and gown and became an honorary graduate. (I had to give back the cap, but some pictures arrived in the mail just now...)
Here I am with the Chancellor, Baroness Floella Benjamin.
Baroness Floella Benjamin and Al Roth.Exeter.July 2015

Friday, June 6, 2014

Organ transplantation at Lund...and a new hat

I'm returning home from Lund today, where I learned about transplantation, lectured on market design and kidney exchange, and received an honorary doctorate.

Tommy Andersson at Lund has been working with ScandiaTransplant to try to help them initiate kidney exchange in Scandinavia, and I had the opportunity to meet with some of those involved. There seems to be a chance that they will be able to learn from our problems as well as our successes with kidney exchange in the U.S.  Differences in the current organization of transplantation in the Nordic countries and the U.S. will present them with some problems (e.g. in including unsensitized pairs), but may also present them with some opportunities (e.g. in integrating kidney exchange and deceased donation).

At Frank Delmonico's suggestion we also visited  the lab of Stig Steen and his colleagues at Lund University Hospital and Igelosa, to learn more about recovery of organs from deceased donors. His lab repairs organs and tests them: we saw a pig heart, beating without the pig...

Here's an announcement about the degree ceremony, held in Lund Cathedral.  The insignia of the degree Honorary Doctor of Economics and Management are a top hat and a ring, and as you are crowned with the hat there is a cannon salute from just outside the Cathedral:

Nobelpristagare och strateg nya hedersdoktorer vid Ekonomihögskolan i Lund and via Google Translate:
Nobel Laureates and strategist new honorary doctors at the School of Economics in Lund
"Professor Al Roth, 2012 Winner of the Riksbank's prize Memory of Alfred Nobel, and strategy professor JC Spender is the 2014 honorary doctorates in Economics at Lund University."

Here's a picture of me and Tommy in our finery:





Here's the program of the ceremony, and the seminar announcement.

The ceremony includes the celebration of alumni who received their doctorates 50 years ago, Jubilee Doctors. You can experience it in Swedish and Latin, more or less as I did, in the 1957 Ingemar Bergman film Wild Strawberries (from 1:20.50 to about 1:23). Thanks to Hakan Holm for that pointer.
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Update: Stig Steen's lab has posted these pictures of our visit. If the second one extended just a little lower you would see the pig heart pumping on it's own...
Från vänster: Professorerna Stig Steen, Alvin Roth samt docenterna Tommy Andersson och Trygve Sjöberg.
Professor Alvin Roth (mitten) och docent Tommy Andersson vid ekonomihögskolan, Lunds universitet i samspråk med professor Stig Steen.

Monday, May 19, 2014

Credentials and degrees (and, I'm now almost a high school grad)


I visited my old high school this past weekend, Martin Van Buren High School in Queens, in New York City. It was fun on a number of different levels. But it reminded me that credentials are complicated. The powers that be inquired into the possibility of giving me a high school diploma, but found, not surprisingly, that I'm still not qualified.  But I got to add an honorary high school diploma to my growing collection of unusual honorary degrees. And I found out that I had been included in the 1969 Yearbook with the rest of my class, although I didn't graduate with them.



Friday, February 28, 2014

Honors flow both ways at Pitt

I'm going to applaud and be applauded at one of my favorite universities, where I taught from 1982-1998.

Nobel Laureate Alvin E. Roth to Address Pitt’s Honors Convocation

Economist conducted much of his Nobel-lauded research on matching theory at Pitt

PITTSBURGH—Alvin E. Roth, co-winner of the 2012 Nobel Prize in economics, will be the keynote speaker at the University of Pittsburgh’s 38th annual Honors Convocation, to be held at 3 p.m. Feb. 28 in Carnegie Music Hall, 4400 Forbes Ave., Oakland. All members of the University community are invited to attend.
Honors Convocation recognizes the accomplishments and contributions of Pitt alumni, faculty, staff, and students. Chancellor Mark A. Nordenberg will preside over the celebratory event. He will bestow an honorary doctoral degree on Roth, who began and completed much of the economics research for which he won the Nobel Prize while serving as Pitt’s first Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Economics from 1982 to 1998. Roth is now the Craig and Susan McCaw Professor of Economics at Stanford University and the George Gund Professor of Economics and Business Administration Emeritus at Harvard University.
“The University’s Honors Convocation recognizes the significant achievements of Pitt people who are pursuing academic, scholarly, and professional excellence in their fields,” said Chancellor Mark A. Nordenberg. “Our friend and former colleague Nobel Laureate Alvin Roth is an exemplary representative of the legacy of excellence that the University of Pittsburgh has established and upon which it continues to build. It will be a special pleasure to welcome him back to Pitt.”
Roth won the Nobel Prize along with Lloyd S. Shapley, professor emeritus of economics and mathematics at UCLA, for solving a key economic problem—how to match players in a market in the best possible way.
Beginning in the 1960s, Shapley developed a body of theoretical work in which he used Cooperative Game Theory to study matching. He found that it is important to find a “stable match,” meaning a match in which there are no two agents who would prefer one another over their current counterparts.
When Roth was a Pitt faculty member in the 1980s, he began using Shapley’s theoretical results to explain how matching happens in practice. He studied the medical job market and eventually began to implement his findings in existing programs like the National Resident Matching Program that matches newly minted doctors with residency positions at hospitals. In another case, he worked with Pitt economics alumnus M. Utku Ünver (A&S ’97G, ’00G) on a study that led to improvements in the design of a program to match kidney donors with compatible kidney recipients. He also has assisted with developing a system for matching students with schools.
When announcing the prize in 2012, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said of Roth and Shapley: “Even though these two researchers worked independently of one another, the combination of Shapley’s basic theory and Roth’s empirical investigations, experiments, and practical design has generated a flourishing field of research and improved the performance of many markets. This year’s prize is awarded for an outstanding example of economic engineering.”
While at Pitt, Roth was the recipient of the 1992 Chancellor’s Distinguished Research Award. He also served as a Fellow in the Center for Philosophy of Science and a professor of business administration in the Joseph M. Katz Graduate School of Business. His work was also influential in developing the field of experimental economics at the University.
“Central to Prof. Roth’s work on market design has been the use of theory and laboratory experiments. Under his leadership, the Department of Economics at Pitt became, and is still regarded as being, one of the leaders in experimental economics,” said Lise Vesterlund, Pitt’s current Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Economics.

Tuesday, January 7, 2014

Celebrating experimental economics (and being celebrated for it) at the University of Amsterdam, January 8

The University of Amsterdam (UvA) is the home of one of Europe's important centers of experimental economics at Creed:


On January 8 I'll be helping celebrate CREED when I receive an honorary doctorate at UvA, along with the legal scholar James Crawford. The announcement says this about me, and my professional connection to the focus of CREED's work:
"He is also one of the pioneers of experimental economics, regarded as one of the Big Four (along with Charles Plott, Reinhard Selten and Vernon Smith) responsible for putting this field on the map in the latter half of the 20th century.
Prof. Arthur Schram, professor of Experimental Economics, has been designated honorary supervisor."

I'll also get a chance to talk to students: Room for Discussion ontvangt Nobelprijswinnaar Alvin Roth, or maybe with more English here
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update: here's the video, see at 1:11:41)


Sunday, June 23, 2013

"דוקטור לשם כבוד" honorary doctorate at the Technion


When I was in Haifa to attend the conference in memory of Uri Rothblum (where I gave this talk), I was reminded that I used to visit often: for many years I was on the Board of Governors of the Technion.

And so, while I was there, I got an honorary degree, and planted a tree.

In Latin, an honorary doctorate is Doctor honoris causa, in Hebrew "דוקטור לשם כבוד" . (Doctor l'shem cavod, i.e. Doctor for the sake of honor...)

Here's an interview I did by phone with a reporter.
Here's a picture of the assembled cast.

(l-r) Prof. Alvin E. Roth; Elisha Yanay; Alfred J. Bar; Yoram Alster; J. Steven Emerson; Daniel Rose; Prof. Peretz Lavie, president of the Technion; Danny Yamin, Chairman of the Technion Council; Lawrence Jackier, Chairman of the Technion Board of Governors; Melvyn H. Bloom; Ilan Biran; and Prof. Jason L. Speyer.
June 10, 2013 
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And here are me and Emilie next to the newly planted tree (the little one on the left, not the big one behind us...)
























Update: here's the video of the honorary doctorate ceremonies. (It's long, but I did my best to keep in short, you can see me starting at 1:22:23--most of the applause is for brevity:)

And here is a much shorter video of the tree-planting ceremony, with President Peretz Lavie doing the honors, and Technion chemistry laureate Dan Schechtman and me planting the trees.

Monday, June 10, 2013

Technion honorary doctorate ceremony

The Technion will broadcast its honorary doctorate ceremony here: Honorary Doctors Ceremony - June 10, 2013 – 8:00 pm, 1:00 pm EDT, USA

I don't imagine that it will be gripping to watch, but I will be there. I served for a number of years on the Technion's Board of Governors, and I am in Israel for the memorial conference of my old friend Uri Rothblum.

Sunday, June 9, 2013

Honorary 7th dan black belt in JKA Shotokan karate, presented by Sensei Masataka Mori


When I was an undergraduate at Columbia University, from the Fall of 1968 through the summer of 1971, I spent a lot of time practicing Shotokan karate, which was very satisfying and which taught me that I could work harder than I had thought. Our instructor was the now legendary Sensei Masataka Mori, who came to New York in 1968, where he founded the NY Dojo, and also taught at Columbia.

It turns out that Nobel prizes are followed by other recognitions, and the most unexpected of those that I have received is that the Japan Karate Association in Tokyo has made me an honorary 7th-degree black belt, something that, given my athletic abilities, is even more unimaginable than being a Nobel laureate.

Sensei Mori came out to San Francisco earlier this year to make the presentation:  in the photo below, he and I are holding the certificate.


Next to me is my wife Emilie, and next to Sensei Mori is T.J. Stiles, the Pulitzer Prize/National Book Award winning biographer of Cornelius Vanderbilt (and Jesse James, too, but in a different book, it turns out that they weren't the same person:).  T.J. is a 5th dan black belt and the chief instructor of the JKA San Francisco dojo.

Behind the camera was Dr. Jacob Levitt, a 4th dan black belt who made the trip with Sensei Mori from New York, where he teaches and practices dermatology at Mt. Sinai Hospital.

Emilie and I felt that we were in the company of three unusually accomplished people.

Here is what I gather is an approximate English translation of the Japanese certificate: