Elinor Ostrom Bio

I had briefly read about Lin Ostrom prior to registering for this class, but I was not aware of the entire scope of her expertise. She was born in 1933 in Los Angeles, CA, and earned her Bachelors and Ph.D. at UCLA. She had not been admitted to UCLA’s Economics Ph.D. program, due to gender discrimination regarding what classes she could take in high school, but was admitted under Political Science. She was a distinguished professor at Indiana University, but also was a research professor and the founding director of the Center for the Study of Institutional Diversity at Arizona State University. She has also lead research on sustainable agriculture and natural resource management through teaming up with Virginia Tech and USAID.

Through the course of her career, Ostrom has earned countless awards. She was the first woman to receive the Johan Skytte Prize in Political Science. Amongst her other awards were the Frank E. Seidman Distinguished award for Political Economy, the John J Carty Award from the National Academy of Sciences, the James Madison Award by the American Political Science Association, the Tisch Civic Engagement Research Prize from the Jonathan M. Tisch College of Citizenship and Public Service at Tufts University, and more. Most notably, Lin Ostrom was the first woman awarded the Nobel Prize in the Economic Sciences.

I am surprised that I had not heard more about such a distinguished person who was a professor at a nearby school. I imagine that if I go further into academia in Economics and/or Political Science and Public Policy. In her research, she identifies eight design principals of stable, local, common pool resource management, which may be applicable to our class, regarding the allocation and use of resources by organizations.