David Deming

David Deming is the Isabelle and Scott Black Professor of Political Economy at Harvard Kennedy School. He is also the Danoff Dean of Harvard College and a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research.

He previously served as the faculty dean of Kirkland House at Harvard College and as the academic dean of Harvard Kennedy School. His research focuses on higher education, economic inequality, skills, technology, and the future of the labor market.

Deming is a principal investigator (along with Raj Chetty and John Friedman) at the CLIMB Initiative, an organization that seeks to study and improve the role of higher education in social mobility.

He is also a faculty lead of the Project on Workforce, a cross-Harvard initiative that focuses on building better pathways to economic mobility through the school-to-work transition.

He recently co-founded (with Ben Weidmann) the Skills Lab, which creates performance-based measures of “soft” skills, such as teamwork and decision-making. Deming received his Ph.D. in public policy from Harvard University.