Roland G. Fryer Jr

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Roland Gerhard Fryer, Jr. (born June 4, 1977 in Daytona Beach, Florida) is a professor of economics at Harvard University. In addition to being affiliated with Harvard University he maintains offices at the National Bureau of Economic Research and W.E.B DuBois Institute. In January 2008, at age 30, he became the youngest African-American to ever receive tenure at Harvard.

Fryer is widely regarded to be one of black America and Harvard's rising stars, having published numerous economics-related papers in prominent academic journals over the past few years^[1]. The New York Times ran an extensive profile of Fryer, entitled "Toward a Unified Theory of Black America," in March of 2005 that dealt extensively with Fryer's rough upbringing: Fryer's mother left when he was very young, and his father, who beat his son, was convicted of rape^[2], effectively leaving Roland to fend for himself.

A 1998 graduate of The University of Texas at Arlington, Fryer attended college on an athletic scholarship; he graduated in two and a half years while holding down a full-time job. Fryer completed his Ph.D. in economics from Penn State in 2002. He also conducted post-doctoral work at the University of Chicago with economist Gary Becker. Over the past three years, Fryer has collaborated with several other academics, including Steven Levitt, the University of Chicago economist and author of Freakonomics, Glenn Loury, a Brown University economist, and Edward Glaeser, an urban economist at Harvard.

Upon completing a three year fellowship with the Harvard Society of Fellows at the end of the 2005-2006 academic year, Fryer joined Harvard's economics department as an assistant professor. In 2005, Fryer was also selected as one of the first Alphonse Fletcher Foundation Fellows. Recently, Fryer has begun work on the Opportunity NYC project, which will study how students in low-performing schools respond to financial incentives.¹

Fryer is currently working as the principal investigator for the American Inequality Lab.