Professor Mirrlees has studied and taught in University of Edinburgh, Oxford University and Cambridge University for over twenty years. Now he is the Master of the Morningside College of The Chinese University of Hong Kong and he has a wealth of experience in residential colleges. In the afternoon, he joined a discussion session with staff from Office of Student Affairs and Office of Academic Affairs. Vice President Lu Xionggang gave an overview of ShanghaiTech University. Professor Mirrlees spoke about the tradition and features of residential colleges of Oxford and Cambridge, as well as his management experience at Morningside College.
Towards the end of his visit he gave an open speech to ShanghaiTech students and high school students on “Innovation, Science and Economics,” which analyzed the interplay of the three factors from academic point of view. President Jiang, Provost and Vice President Yin Jie and Vice President Gong Jinkang participated in the talk.
Professor Sir James Mirrlees was born in Scotland and obtained his first and second degrees in Mathematics from the University of Edinburgh and the University of Cambridge, and his PhD in Economics from Cambridge in 1963. He was Edgeworth Professor of Economics and Fellow of Nuffield College in Oxford from 1968 to 1995 and after 1995, Professor of Political Economy at Cambridge. Since 2002 he has been Distinguished Professor-at-Large at The Chinese University of Hong Kong and in 2009 he became Master of Morningside College, established in The Chinese University of Hong Kong.
He was awarded a Nobel Prize in 1996 for his fundamental contributions to the economic theory of incentives under asymmetric information, together with William Vickrey from Columbia University. He was knighted for his contributions to economic science in 1998.
