Eldar Shafir is the Class of 1987 Professor of Behavioral Science and Public Policy, Professor of Psychology and Public Affairs, and the Inaugural Director of Princeton’s Kahneman-Treisman Center for Behavioral Science and Public Policy. A Princeton faculty member since 1989, he studies decision-making, cognitive science, and behavioral economics. His recent research has focused on decision-making in contexts of poverty and on the application of behavioral research to policy.

He is Past President of the Society for Judgment and Decision Making, and served as Vice-Chair of the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on Behavior, and member of the Forum’s Global Council on the Future of Behavioral Sciences. He is co-founder and scientific director at ideas42, a social science R&D lab. In 2012 President Barack Obama appointed him to the President's Advisory Council on Financial Capability. He has received several awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the William James Book Award. He was named one of Foreign Policy Magazine’s 100 Leading Global Thinkers of 2013, and was elected fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is the editor of The Behavioral Foundations of Public Policy (2012) and co-author, with Sendhil Mullainathan, of Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much (2013).

Shafir received his B.A. from Brown University and his Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.