I am excited to speak to you, our alumni, as the new department chair. It is a great privilege to run this department, and I am excited about all we have accomplished this year and what we will do going forward.
Below we share some of the biggest stories of what has happened here over the past year like our first annual Young Alumni Networking Event and the success of our top-notch Fed Challenge team. We welcomed threenewfaculty members doing exciting work in health economics, environmental economics, and international trade. They join our existing set of faculty working on fascinating and impactful topics like how we can incentivize people to consume energy more efficiently and from cleaner sources.
We also had a banner year of accolades for our faculty and students. Prof. Stacy Dickert-Conlin was named the Interim Frederick S. Addy Distinguished Chair while Prof. Hanzhe Zhang was named the Interim Mark A. Simon Distinguished Associate Professor acknowledging their incredible contributions to economic research, teaching, and service to the department and the economics profession. Professor Jeffrey Wooldridge was honored by being named to the 2025 Highly Cited Researchers list organized annually by Clarivate Analytics, featuring the top 0.1% of the world’s scientists and social scientists.
We congratulated multiple incredible graduating student scholars with awards and wished them and their colleagues well as they entered their careers with their MSU Economics degrees in hand. This includes our Outstanding Senior Clio Selyuzhitsky who will be attending graduate school at University of California, San Diego.
We sent off doctoral students with their Ph.D.’s to work at institutions like Meta, Inc., the Mayo Clinic, and New York University. This includes the newly minted Dr. Wenjia Cao who is now an assistant professor at the Singapore Management University.
All in all, an incredible year and I am very excited about the year to come. It is so great having the opportunity to be your chair. I hope you will remain connected with us through our social media accounts on Facebook, X, LinkedIn, Instagram, and BlueSky, and if you have any news to share please reach out to our communications manager, Katie Frey, by email, freykath@msu.edu.
Finally, please consider making a contribution to the department. Your gifts help support our undergraduate and graduate students. There is so much programming – like our student success initiatives, emergency assistance, and support for doctoral student research – that we would not be able to do without the generosity of our alumni and friends. We are so grateful for your support and continued relationship with the Department of Economics. Thank you and have a Happy New Year.
Cheers and Go Green!
Scott A. Imberman
Professor and Chair
Department of Economics
Michigan State University