James J. Heckman, winner of the Nobel Memorial Prize for Economic Science in 2000, is currently the Henry Schultz Distinguished Service Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago, where he has served since 1973. At the University, he directs the Economics Research Center and the Center for Social Program Evaluation at the Harris School of Public Policy Studies. He is the Professor of Science and Society at the University College Dublin, as well as a Senior Research Fellow at the American Bar Foundation. Heckman's work has been devoted to the development of a scientific basis for economic policy evaluation, with special emphasis on models of individuals and disaggregated groups and to the problems and possibilities created by heterogeneity, diversity and unobserved counterfactual states.

Heckman has received numerous awards for his work, including the John Bates Clark Award of the American Economic Association in 1983, the 2005 and 2007 Dennis Aigner Award for Applied Econometrics from the Journal of Econometrics, the 2007 Theodore W. Schultz Award from the American Agricultural Economics Association, the 2005 Jacob Mincer Award for Lifetime Achievement in Labor Economics, the 2005 Ulysses Medal from the University College Dublin, and the 2008 Gold Medal of the President of the Italian Republic.

He is currently Associate Editor of the Journal of Labor Economics. He is also a member of the National Academy of Sciences and is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Econometric Society, the Society of Labor Economics, and the American Statistical Association.