Edmund Phelps is McVickar Professor of Political Economy at Columbia University and Director of Columbia's Center on Capitalism and Society. He was the winner of the 2006 Nobel Prize in Economics. He holds many honorary doctorates and professorships, including from the Université libre de Bruxelles, Tsinghua University, and the Institut d'Etudes Politiques de Paris. He is a Fellow of the National Academy of Science and a Distinguished Fellow of the American Economic Association. In 2008, he was named Chevalier de la Légion d'Honneur and awarded the Premio Pico della Mirandola and the Kiel Global Economy Prize. In 2010, he was appointed Dean of New Huadu Business School at Minjiang University. In 2011, he received the Louise Blouin Creative Leadership Award and was named a Full Foreign Member of the Russian Academy of Sciences and in 2012 he was elected an Honorary Patron of the University Philosophical Society of Trinity College.