Thomas Sargent is a macroeconomist and expert in monetary economics. In 2011, he received the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for furthering the development of the rational expectations theory, which greatly affected the field of macroeconomics.

 The theory of rational expectations suggests that it is difficult for the government to achieve its desired effects no matter what economic policy is implemented because people make rational judgments by utilizing all sources of information. This theory suggests a new framework for analyzing changes in government policy and points out the limitations of the Keynesian Economics, which claims that the government can control unemployment, prices, and gross domestic product (GDP). This marked the end of the Keynesian era of economic thought.

 Australian astrophysicist Brian Schmidt has been the Vice-Chancellor of The Australian National University since 2016. He graduated with a BS in physics and astronomy from the University of Arizona and received an MA and PhD in astronomy from Harvard University. In 1993, under the tutelage of Professor Robert Kirshner, he came into the spotlight in academia with his doctoral thesis on measuring the Hubble Constant using Type II Supernovae.

 After his postgraduate study, he served as a postdoctoral research fellow at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics until 1994. In 1995, he formed the High-Z Supernova Search Team to study supernovae at the Mount Stromlo Observatory, the headquarters of The Australian National University Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics. Eventually, the team used data on a five-billion-year-old Type Ia supernova to present early evidence that the universe’s expansion rate was accelerating. For this accomplishment, he was jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2011.

 Jean Tirole is a professor of economics at Toulouse 1 Capitole University and the scientific director of the Toulouse Industrial Economics Institute (IDEI). He began studying corporate regulation theories in the mid-1980s and is unrivaled in the field of corporate monopoly research.

 Tirole focused on researching business-oriented regulations rather than advocating unconditional ones, categorized the types of monopoly firms, and developed a model for how a firm should set prices for its products. His work has been greatly influential in developing government responses to monopolist expansion by giant corporations.
Tirole won the European Economic Association’s Yrjö Jahnsson Award in 1993, French CNRS’s Gold Medal in 2007, and the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics in 2014 for his analysis of the regulation of natural monopolies.

 Esther Duflo is an American economist who was given tenure as an associate professor at the young age of 29. She had been interested in helping those less fortunate since she was a child, and she saw becoming an economist who advises governments as a way to fight against poverty.

 Traveling to more than forty countries for the past twenty years, she has researched poverty at the local level and presented solutions based on unique scientific experiments to tackle the difficult questions. For this experimental approach to alleviating poverty, she became the youngest recipient of the Nobel Prize in Economics at age 46 in 2019. She’s also an accomplished author of such internationally-acclaimed works as 'Poor Economics' and 'Good Economics for Hard Times'.