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Tuesday, October 13, 2026 | 7 - 8 p.m. | Adam W. Herbert University Center

Jake Sullivan was the 28th Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs (National Security Advisor), serving in that position for all four years of the Biden Administration. In the Obama Administration, he served as Deputy Assistant to the President and National Security Advisor to then-Vice President Biden, Director of the Policy Planning Staff at the U.S. Department of State, and Deputy Chief of Staff to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. 

In the years between the Obama and Biden administrations, Sullivan was a Senior Fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, where he wrote a number of articles on the future of American national security and economic policy.  He helped conceive and design a bipartisan project on a new approach to international economic policy, known as “foreign policy for the middle class.”  He also held teaching posts at Yale Law School, Dartmouth College, and the University of New Hampshire. And he served as a senior policy advisor on Joe Biden’s 2020 presidential campaign. 

Sullivan holds a B.A. in political science and international studies from Yale College; a M.Phil in International Relations from Oxford, where he was a Rhodes Scholar; and a J.D. from Yale Law School. He clerked for Justice Stephen Breyer of the Supreme Court of the United States and Judge Guido Calabresi of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. He grew up as the second of five children in Minneapolis, Minnesota and is a proud product of the Minneapolis public schools. He and his wife Maggie Goodlander have a permanent home in New Hampshire. 

Tuesday, January 12, 2027 | 7 - 8 p.m. | Adam W. Herbert University Center

Tuesday, March 30, 2027 | 7 - 8 p.m. | Adam W. Herbert University Center

Daron Acemoglu is an Institute Professor at MIT, Faculty Co-Director of James M. and Cathleen D. Stone Center on Inequality and Shaping the Future of Work, and a Research Affiliate at MIT's newly established Blueprint Labs. He is an elected fellow of the National Academy of Sciences, American Philosophical Society, the British Academy of Sciences, the Turkish Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Econometric Society, the European Economic Association, and the Society of Labor Economists. He is also a member of the Group of Thirty. 

He is the author of six books, including New York Times bestseller Why Nations Fail: Power, Prosperity, and Poverty (joint with James A. Robinson), Introduction to Modern Economic Growth, The Narrow Corridor: States, Societies, and the Fate of Liberty (with James A. Robinson), and Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity (with Simon Johnson). 

His academic work covers a wide range of areas, including political economy, economic development, economic growth, technological change, inequality, labor economics and economics of networks. 

Daron Acemoglu has received the inaugural T. W. Shultz Prize from the University of Chicago in 2004, and the inaugural Sherwin Rosen Award for outstanding contribution to labor economics in 2004, Distinguished Science Award from the Turkish Sciences Association in 2006, the John von Neumann Award, Rajk College, Budapest in 2007, the Carnegie Fellowship in 2017, the Jean-Jacques Laffont Prize in 2018, the Global Economy Prize in 2019, and the CME Mathematical and Statistical Research Institute prize in 2021. 

He was awarded the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel in 2024 (with Co-Laureates Simon Johnson and James A. Robinson), the John Bates Clark Medal in 2005, the Erwin Plein Nemmers Prize in 2012, and the 2016 BBVA Frontiers of Knowledge Award.  

He holds Honorary Doctorates from the University of Utrecht, the Bosporus University, University of Athens, Bilkent University, the University of Bath, Ecole Normale Superieure, Saclay Paris, and the London Business School.