Since 2003, Václav Klaus has been President of the Czech Republic. In the communist era he was a researcher at the Institute of Economics of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences, later he was forced to leave the Academy of Sciences for political reasons and worked in various positions in the Czechoslovak State Bank.
He began his political career in 1989 as finance minister. At the end of 1990, he became the chairman of the Civic Forum, at the time the country’s strongest political entity. In April 1991, he co-founded the Civic Democratic Party and remained its chairman until December 2002. Václav Klaus won parliamentary elections in June 1992 and became prime minister of the Czech Republic, overseeing the "Velvet Divorce" of the Czechoslovak Federation. In 1996, he successfully defended his post as prime minister. After the break-up of his governing coalition, he became chairman of the Chamber of Deputies in 1998 for four years. He was elected as the President of the Czech Republic in February 2003 and re-elected for the second five-year term in February 2008. Václav Klaus studied at the Prague School of Economics, where he currently holds professorship in finance.

Kevin M. Murphy is the first professor at a business school to be chosen as a MacArthur Fellow in the 25 years that the awards have been given. He was selected for "revealing economic forces shaping vital social phenomena such as wage inequality, unemployment, addiction, medical research, and economic growth." The foundation felt his work "challenges preconceived notions and attacks seemingly intractable economic questions, placing them on a sound empirical and theoretical footing." In addition to his position at the University of Chicago, Murphy works as a faculty research associate for the National Bureau of Economic Research. He primarily studies the empirical analysis of inequality, unemployment, and relative wages as well as the economics of growth and development and the economic value of improvements in health and longevity.

In 2007, Murphy and fellow GSB faculty member Robert Topel won the Kenneth J. Arrow Award for the best research paper in health economics for "The Value of Health and Longevity," published in the Journal of Political Economy. The award is given annually by the International Health Economics Association.

A fellow of the Econometric Society and an elected member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, Murphy was a John Bates Clark Medalist in 1997. He has received fellowships from the Earhart Foundation, the Sloan Foundation, and the Friedman Fund.

Murphy is also the author of two books and several academic articles. His writing also has been published in numerous mainstream publications including the Boston Globe, the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, and two Wall Street Journal articles coauthored by Nobel laureate Gary Becker.

He earned his PhD in 1986 from the University of Chicago after graduating from the University of California at Los Angeles with a bachelor's degree in economics in 1981. He joined the GSB faculty in 1984.

• Director, A. Alfred Taubman Center for State and Local Government, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University
• Director, Rappaport Institute for Greater Boston, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University
• Fred and Eleanor Glimp Professor of Economics, Department of Economics, Harvard University
• Editor, Quarterly Journal of Economics
• Member, National Academy of Public Administration

• PhD in Molecular Biology
• Dean, Faculty of Biological Sciences, Catholic University of Chile
• Member Chilean Academy of Sciences, The Latin American Academy of Sciences, The Academy of Sciences for the Developing World (TWAS) and The Pontifical Academy of Sciences.
• Advisor in biotechnology to industry and various governmental institutions
• Member of the board, Instituto Libertad y Desarrollo

• Professor of Logic and Philosophy of Science, University of Bologna
• Socio corrispondente of the Accademia delle Scienze dell’Istituto di Bologna.
• Member of the Mont Pèlerin Society
• Member of the Board of Advisors of the Fondazione Luigi Einaudi, Rome
• Member of the Board of Advisors of the Centro di Ricerca e Documentazione Luigi Einaudi, Turin
• Member of the Board of Advisors of the Foundation for Italian Art and Culture, New York
• Member of the Board of Guarantors of the Italian Academy for Advanced Studies in America at Columbia University, New York
• Senior Research Fellow, National Center for Business Ethics at Loyola University, New Orleans.
• Member of the Executive Board of the Italian public broadcasting company (RAI)
• General Secretary, Aspen Institute Italia
• President, Fondazione Premio Internazionale “Galileo Galilei” of the Italian Rotary Clubs.

Julian Savulescu is qualified in medicine, bioethics and analytic philosophy. He has published over 100 articles in journals such as the British Medical Journal, Lancet, Australasian Journal of Philosophy, Bioethics, the Journal of Medical Ethics, American Journal of Bioethics, Medical Journal of Australia and Philosophy, Psychiatry and Psychology.

Previously, he was Editor of the Journal of Medical Ethics, the highest impact factor journal at the time in medical and applied ethics. He was Director of and established the Ethics of Genetics Unit at the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute, Royal Children’s Hospital, Melbourne, Australia. He was also Director of and established the Bioethics Program at the Centre for the Study of Health and Society at the University of Melbourne and the Chair of the Department of Human Services, Victoria, Ethics Committee. He has worked as Clinical Ethicist at the Oxford Radcliffe Hospitals.

Professor Savulescu is engaged in research, education and stimulating open public discussion around the ethical issues which arise in every day life and which are related to the changes in society, particularly those related to technological advancement. He has worked broadly in the ethics of science and medicine. His main current research interests are the ethics of the new biosciences: cloning, stem cells, genetics, artificial reproduction and neuroscience.

• Chairman, President’s Council of Economic Advisers
• Jack Steel Parker Professor of Human Resources Management and Economics and the Morris Arnold Cox Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution (on a leave of absence)
• Elected fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2000) the Econometric Society, former President of the Society of Labor Economists
• Founding editor of the Journal of Labor Economics and founder of two companies
• Recipient of many academic awards including IZA Prize in Labor Economics, Leo Melamed Prize, Adam Smith Prize and honorary degrees.

William A. Niskanen has been chairman of the Cato Institute since 1985, following service as a member and acting chairman of President Reagan's Council of Economic Advisers. Niskanen has served as director of economics at the Ford Motor Company, professor of economics at the University of California at Berkeley and Los Angeles, assistant director of the federal Office of Management and Budget, a defense analyst at the Rand Corporation, the director of special studies in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, and the director of the Program Analysis division at the Institute of Defense Analysis. He has written on many public policy issues including corporate governance, defense, federal budget policy, regulation, Social Security, taxes, and trade. Niskanen's 1971 book Bureaucracy and Representative Government is considered a classic. His most recent book is After Enron: the Lessons for Public Policy. Niskanen holds a B.A. from Harvard and a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Chicago. The University of Chicago recently honored him with a lifetime professional service award.

• President & Founder, National Center for Policy Analysis
• Founder, Health Economics Roundtable, National Association for Business Economics
• Duncan Black Award Winner for Best Article in Public Choice Economics

Myron S. Scholes is Chairman of Platinum Grove Asset Management, an alternative investment fund, specializing in liquidity provision services to the global wholesale capital markets. Professor Scholes is the Frank E. Buck Professor of Finance Emeritus, at the Stanford University Graduate School of Business since 1996.

He is co-originator of the Black-Scholes options pricing model, which is the basis of the pricing and risk-management technology that is used to value and to manage the risk of financial instruments around the world. For this work, he was awarded the Alfred Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1997.

• Professor Extraordinary in the Department of Economics of the University San Pablo CEU in Madrid.
• Director of the Centre for Political Economy and Regulation at San Pablo CEU University in Madrid.
• Professor at Saint Louis University
• Member of the Monetary Experts Panel of the Committee on Economic and Monetary Affairs of the European Parliament.
• Member of the Spanish Advisory Board of Cap Gemini
• Member of the Board of CEPS (Centre for European Policy Studies, Brussels)
• Member of the Mont Pèlerin Society
• Adjunct Scholar of the Cato Institute.

• Deputy Vice-Chancellor and Provost, The University of Hong Kong
• Founding Director, Hong Kong Centre for Economic Research
• Founding Director, Hong Kong Institute of Economics and Business Strategy
• Founding Dean, Faculty of Business and Economics, The University of Hong Kong
• Professor of Economics, The University of Hong Kong
• Chairman, Council of Advisers, Hong Kong Institute of Monetary Research
• Member, Mont Pelerin Society

Kaushik Basu is Professor of Economics and the C. Marks Professor of International Studies, Department of Economics, and Director, Center for Analytic Economics, Cornell University. He has held visiting positions at CORE (Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium), the Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton), and the London School of Economics, where he was Distinguished Visitor in 1993. He has been Visiting Professor at Harvard University (Economics Department)-2004, Princeton University (Economics Department)-1989-91, and M.I.T. (Economics Department)-2001-02. In 1992 he founded the Centre for Development Economics in Delhi and was its first Executive Director from 1992-96. He is also a founding member of the Madras School of Economics.

Kaushik Basu is Editor of Social Choice and Welfare, and served (or serves) on the Editorial Boards of the Journal of Economic Perspectives, Journal of Development Economics, World Bank Economic Review and other journals. A Fellow of the Econometric Society and a recipient of the Mahalanobis Memorial Award for contributions to economics, Kaushik Basu has published widely in the areas of Development Economics, Industrial Organization, Game Theory and Welfare Economics. His books include Analytical Development Economics (1997, MIT Press), Prelude to Political Economy: A Study of the Social and Political Foundations of Economics (2000, Oxford University Press) and Of People, Of Places: Sketches from an Economist’s Notebook (1994, Oxford University Press).

Professor Basu has also contributed popular articles to magazines and newspapers, such as The New York Times, Scientific American, India Today and Business Standard. From January 2004 he has been writing a once-a-month column for BBC News Online. He has also participated in television discussions and debates, including on CNN Newsnight with Aaron Brown and NDTV’s Budget debates.

Formerly: Mexico’s Treasury Secretary 2000-2006

• Professor, Graduate School of Commerce and Management, Hitotsubashi University
• President, Japan Society of Monetary Economics
• Chairman, The Organizing Committee of the MPS 2008 General Meeting.
• Guest Professor, Nankai University (China)
• Guest Professor, Dongbei University of Finance and Economics (China)
• Guest Editor, The Journal of Asian Economics
• Editorial Board Member, Chulalongkorn Journal of Economics (Thailand)

Naushad Forbes is Director of Forbes Marshall, India's leading Steam Engineering & Control Instrumentation company. He is also the CEO of the Steam Engineering Companies within the group. Naushad has been a Consulting Professor in the Management Science & Engineering program at Stanford University since 1987. He has developed courses in Technology and Policy in Newly Industrialized Countries and the Management of Technology in Firms in Newly Industrialized Countries.

Naushad received his Bachelors and Master's Degrees from Stanford University; and his Ph.D in Industrial Engineering was on the Process of Technical Entrepreneurship in India, also from Stanford.
He is a visiting faculty at the Industrial Management School, Stanford University.

He also holds the B.A.S. in Industrial Engineering & History from the Stanford University.

He is associated with the Forbes Marshall group of companies.
He has a number of publications to his credit including the following: Forbes N. and D. Wield, From Followers to Leaders: Managing Technology in Newly Industrialising Countries 2002, Routledge.

Forbes N., Doing Business in India: What has liberalization changed?, Working Paper No. 93, Center for Research on Economic Development and Policy Reform, Stanford University, 2001.

Forbes N. and D. Wield, Managing R&D in technology followers, Research Policy, Vol. 29, 2000.

Naushad is on the board of several Indian companies and an advisory board member in several institutions. H is also the current Deputy Chairman-Western Region of the Confederation on Indian Industry.

Gary S. Becker won the 1992 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences "for having extended the domain of microeconomic analysis to a wide range of human behavior and interaction, including non-market behavior." He also is the Rose-Marie and Jack R. Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, a Research Associate of the Economics Research Center at the National Opinion Research Center, and an associate member of the Institute of Fiscal and Monetary Policy for the Ministry of Finance in Japan.

Becker has pioneered study in the fields of human capital, economics of the family, and economic analysis of crime, discrimination, addiction, and population. He is the author of more than 12 books and more than 50 articles.

Becker completed his undergraduate work summa cum laude in mathematics at Princeton University, where he "accidentally took a course in economics" as a freshman and was "greatly attracted by the mathematical rigor of a subject that dealt with social organization." He earned a master's degree and a PhD from the University of Chicago, where he was inspired by Milton Friedman. His doctorate was awarded in 1955. Becker also holds honorary degrees from several institutions, including Princeton University, Harvard University, Columbia University, and Hitotsubashi University in Japan. He was an assistant professor in economics at the University of Chicago from 1954 to 1957, then taught at Columbia University from 1957 to 1969, before he returned to Chicago.

Becker is a founding member of the National Academy of Education and a fellow in the American Statistical Association, the Econometric Society, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and the International Union for the Scientific Study of Population. He also is a member of the American Economic Association, of which he was president in 1987. A long-time faculty member of the University of Chicago, Becker joined the GSB in 2002.

In 1967, Becker was awarded the John Bates Clark Medal, which is given once every two years to the most outstanding American economist under the age of 40; the Seidman Award; and the first social science Award of Merit from the National Institute of Health. He also was awarded the National Medal of Science in 2000 for his work in social policy.

Becker's current research focuses on habits and addictions, formation of preferences, human capital, and population growth. He is a featured columnist for BusinessWeek and coauthor of the Becker-Posner Blog with Richard Posner, senior lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School. The blog can be viewed at http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/.

Pascal Salin is Professor of economics at Université Paris - Dauphine. He has been President of the Mont Pèlerin Society, 1994-96.

He is the author of L'unité monétaire européenne : au profit de qui ? (foreword by Friedrich Hayek), Economica, 1980; L'ordre monétaire mondial, Presses Universitaires de France, l982; L'arbitraire fiscal, Robert Laffont, l985; La vérité sur la monnaie, Odile Jacob, 1990; Macroéconomie, Presses Universitaires de France, 1991; Libre-échange et protectionnisme, Presses Universitaires de France, 1991; La concurrence, Paris, Presses universitaires de France, 1995; Libéralisme, Odile Jacob, 2000; Français, n’ayez pas peur d’être libéraux, Paris, Odile Jacob, 2007. He has been an editor of Recent Issues in the Theory of Flexible Exchange Rates (Claassen, E.M. and P. Salin, eds.), North-Holland, l983; Currency Competition and Monetary Union, Martinus Nijhoff BV, l984; Présence de Jacques Rueff (François Bourricaud and Pascal Salin, eds.), Paris, Plon, 1989 .

Pascal Salin is the author of numerous articles, mainly in French and in English, published in academic journals and collective books, in France and other countries. He is a corresponding member of the Argentine Academy of Science, a member of the Academic Board of several institutes and Universities (United States, Brazil, Argentina, Peru, Japan, Hong-Kong, United Kingdom, Belgium, Poland, Gabon, South Africa, Spain, Switzerland, Italy, Romania and France) . He is a regular writer in the French newspaper Le Figaro and he writes articles for various other newspapers (particularly Le Monde and The Wall Street Journal).

He has been visiting Professor, The Bologna Center, Johns Hopkins University; consultant at the research department of the IMF; an expert at EC; a consultant at the Harvard Institute for International Development, the Sahel Club, FAO, USAID, the UN Economic Commission for Africa, the government of Niger; a member of the Committee on employment appointed by the Prime Minister (1993); a member of the Advisory committee of Arthur Andersen France; a member of the Academic Working Party of the World Gold Council; the chairman of the national committee to appoint new Professors in economics in French Universities (2003-2004).