Nobel laureate in economics Thomas C. Schelling shared his 2005 Bank of Sweden prize with Robert Aumann for enhancing understanding of conflict and cooperation through game theory analysis. Dr. Schelling is Lucius N. Littauer Professor of Political Economy Emeritus at Harvard University and Distinguished University Professor Emeritus at the University of Maryland. He was one of the designer’s of the United States’ Cold War nuclear strategy and played a major role in establishing “strategic studies” as an academic field. In addition, his internationally renowned work, including his widely-translated book, The Strategy of Conflict (1960, 1963, and 1980), prompted new developments in game theory and accelerated its use and application throughout the social sciences. Dr. Schelling is celebrated for the originality and creativity of his theorizing and the intellectual rigor of his policy analysis. Moving easily from real-world issues to elegant models, he distilled the essence of problems ranging from nuclear deterrence and racial segregation to smoking to global warming. A graduate of the University of California at Berkeley, he worked briefly as an analyst at the U.S. Bureau of the Budget before going on to Harvard University where he was elected a Junior Fellow of the Society of Fellows and earned a Ph.D. in economics in 1951. After completing his doctoral examinations, he took leave to serve with the administration of the Marshall Plan in Europe and then on the White House staff as a foreign policy advisor to the President. He left what had become the Office of the Director for Mutual Security in 1953 to join the faculty of Yale University as an associate professor of economics. His primary theoretical interest was bargaining theory, and he came to see that an immediate and important application of the kind of game theory he had taken up was in military foreign policy, especially nuclear warfare. Dr. Schelling served on the senior staff of the Rand Corporation for a year and went to Washington with a small contingent attached to the staff preparing for the 1958 Geneva Convention on Measures to Safeguard against Surprise Attack. The position he argued in two papers was that arms control should be oriented towards measures that precluded either side’s acquiring a “first-strike” capacity, an objective that entailed assuring the safety of retaliatory nuclear weapons. He held that the only viable position regarding their use would be “no weapons,” not some quantitative or qualitative limits. Accepting a professorship in economics at Harvard in 1958, Dr. Schelling divided his time between the economics department and its Center for International Affairs, then, from its establishment in 1969, the John F. Kennedy School of Government of which he was considered a “founding father”. He was named Littauer Professor in 1974, a title he held until his retirement in 1990. He then accepted appointment as Distinguished University Professor at Maryland where he offered courses in the economics department and the School of Public Policy until retiring again in 2003. A fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a Distinguished Fellow of the American Economic Association, he is a member of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) and of The Institute of Medicine. Dr. Schelling has served as president of the Eastern Economic Association and the American Economic Association. He is a recipient of the Frank E. Seidman Distinguished Award in Political Economy and the NAS Award for Behavioral Research Relevant to the Prevention of Nuclear War. He holds honorary doctorates from the RAND Graduate School of Policy Analysis and Erasmus University in Rotterdam. In addition to some two hundred papers published in academic journals or as chapters in volumes of collected works, he is the author of nine books. He wrote two classical economic studies before The Strategy of Conflict, selected as a “Citation Classic” by the Institute of Scientific Information, and followed it with Strategy and Arms Control (1961 and 1985), which he co-authored with Morton H. Halperin, Arms and Influence (1966), Micromotives and Macrobehaviors (1978), Thinking Through the Energy Problem (1979), and Choice and Consequence (1984). His most recent book, Strategies of Commitment and Other Essays, was published by Harvard University Press earlier this year.