Student Awards

2024-2025 Student Award Recipients

The Kenneth C. Griffin Department of Economics is proud to announce this year’s recipients of the Martin and Margaret Lee Prizes and Graduate Student Teaching awards, as well as two memorial Prizes: The Yiran Fan Memorial Prize and the George S. Tolley Prize. 

Econ-MA Thesis Awards

Parth Viatha
MAPSS-Econ (BA/MA)
"Conditional Covariance of Risky and Risk-Free Assets"

Joanne (Yongyin) Liang
MAPSS-Econ
"From the Ashes: Urban Reconstruction and Land Values after the Great Chicago Fire of 1871"

Lee Prize Award Winners

Tyler Patterson and Pedro Adami Oliboni

From left to right: Jason Hong, Pedro Adami Oliboni, Ken Miyahara Coello

Ragini Jain

Pictured from left to right: Deniz Dutz, Ashton Pallottini, Sofia Shchukina

The Yiran Fan Memorial Prize is a fellowship established in memory of late UChicago PhD student, Yiran Fan, which includes contributions from Fan’s parents and is awarded to a student in the Joint Program in Financial Economics.

It was established to commemorate Yiran Fan's kind and generous spirit and his devotion to bringing together fellow students, young researchers, and faculty as companions in learning. The prize is award by a student selection committee based on student nominations for the graduate student who made the greatest contribution to establishing and maintaining an open and nurturing learning environment for those with interests in economic dynamics, macroeconomics, or financial economics.

The recipient of the 2024 Yiran Fan Memorial Prize is Manav Chaudhary.

Past awardees are Marco Loseto (2023), Will Cassidy (2022, co-awardee), Aditya Chaudhry (2022, co-awardee), and Simon Oh (2021).

Manav Chaudhary

A donation made in honor of George S. Tolley will fund a $5000 prize for three years, beginning in 2021. The George S. Tolley Prize, initiated by economist Vinod Thomas (AM'74, PhD'77) is awarded to a student whose 3rd year doctoral research paper demonstrates the potential for the impact of economic analysis on policy. The prize is a special award bestowed over and above the awardee’s graduate funding package. It is conferred in the Fall Quarter of the winning student’s fourth year in the doctoral program. 

All rising fourth year students who have completed their third year research paper are eligible to apply. If you would like to be considered, please email your interest along with your third year research paper to Graduate Student Affairs Administrator, Kathryn Falzareno at kfalzareno@uchicago.edu. The winner is selected by a faculty committee led by Mikhail Golosov, the Director of Graduate Studies, and will be announced at the annual Graduate Student/Faculty Lunch in November.

For: Trade and Decelerating Reallocation
Craig Chikis

Sofia Shchukina, a PhD student in the Kenneth C. Griffin Department of Economics, was awarded funding for the 2023-24 academic year as part of UChicagoGRAD's PhD Advance internship program for her work with NPR's Planet Money.

The PhD Advance program supports students in building new skills and applying their advanced-degree training in an area of professional interest in academia, industry, nonprofits, or government. The internships are student driven and engage students’ academic work. With coaching from UChicagoGRAD, PhD students create their own projects based on their specific interests and needs. They receive a $6,000 stipend for an internship lasting 300 hours.    

The PhD Advance program prioritizes applicants who design customized, project-based internships. Project-based internships are those that engage the intern in a coherent set of responsibilities that progressively build toward a specific deliverable or outcome. Internships involving unrelated, ad-hoc tasks are not considered project-based opportunities. The program also gives preference to internship projects at organizations at which the applicant has no previous affiliation.

For more information about the program and to apply, visit grad.uchicago.edu.