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The 2018 John Bates Clark medal of the American Economic Association was awarded to Parag Pathak for his contributions to our understanding of the impacts of educational policies. Both the theory and the empirical research was notable for taking the constraints facing administrators seriously. As a result, Parag’s research led directly to educational reforms in many large U.S. cities and abroad. The leading example is Parag (and co-author’s) research on school assignment mechanisms which led many school districts to institute fairer and more efficient procedures for allocating students to schools. The institutional detail Parag learned in working on the assignment problem led to innovative empirical work on the impacts of different types of schools, most notably of charters, which was suggestive of the characteristics of both successful schools and of the types of students who gained from being enrolled in them. His recent work utilizes the data that has been generated by the new assignment rules to provide complete frameworks for the quantitative analysis of the benefits of different assignment mechanisms, and has an enlightening demonstration of those benefits in New York high schools.
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This content will become publicly available on January 1, 2026
The legacies of A. O. Dennis Willows and Peter A. Getting: neuroscience research using Tritonia
This review was inspired by a January 2024 conference held at Friday Harbor Laboratories, WA, honoring the pioneering work of A.O. Dennis Willows, who initiated research on the sea slug Tritonia diomedea (now T. exsulans). A chance discovery while he was a student at a summer course there has, over the years, led to many insights into the roles of identified neurons in neural circuits and their influence on behavior. Among Dennis’s trainees was Peter Getting, whose later groundbreaking work on central pattern generators profoundly influenced the field and included one of the earliest uses of realistic modeling for understanding neural circuits. Research on Tritonia has led to key conceptual advances in polymorphic or multifunctional neural networks, intrinsic neuromodulation, and the evolution of neural circuits. It also has enhanced our understanding of geomagnetic sensing, learning and memory mechanisms, prepulse inhibition, and even drug-induced hallucinations. Although the community of researchers studying Tritonia has never been large, its contributions to neuroscience have been substantial, underscoring the importance of examining a diverse array of animal species rather than focusing on a small number of standard model organisms.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2227963
- PAR ID:
- 10577609
- Publisher / Repository:
- Journal of Neurophysiology
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Journal of Neurophysiology
- Volume:
- 133
- Issue:
- 1
- ISSN:
- 0022-3077
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 34 to 45
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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The 2018 John Bates Clark medal of the American Economic Association was awarded to Parag Pathak for his contributions to our understanding of the impacts of educational policies. Both the theory and the empirical research was notable for taking the constraints facing administrators seriously. As a result, Parag’s research led directly to educational reforms in many large U.S. cities and abroad. The leading example is Parag (and co-author’s) research on school assignment mechanisms which led many school districts to institute fairer and more efficient procedures for allocating students to schools. The institutional detail Parag learned in working on the assignment problem led to innovative empirical work on the impacts of different types of schools, most notably of charters, which was suggestive of the characteristics of both successful schools and of the types of students who gained from being enrolled in them. His recent work utilizes the data that has been generated by the new assignment rules to provide complete frameworks for the quantitative analysis of the benefits of different assignment mechanisms, and has an enlightening demonstration of those benefits in New York high schools.more » « less
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