Gautam Rao received his Ph.D. in Economics from UC Berkeley in 2014, and is presently a post-doctoral research fellow at Microsoft Research Labs, New England. He will begin an appointment as an Assistant Professor at the Department of Economics at Harvard in July 2015. Gautam's research brings insights from psychology to bear on topics in economics, particularly topics relevant to developing countries.

Recent projects include studying how mixing rich and poor students in schools in India affects social preferences and behaviors, how citizens are motivated to vote by social image concerns, and how innovative financial contracts can help patients with hypertension overcome their self-control problems in rural India. In addition to working in behavioral and development economics, he has secondary interests in political and labor economics.