Lloyd Shapley, a professor emeritus of economics and mathematics at UCLA who received the Nobel memorial prize in economics in December 2012, is one of the five newest honorees to receive the Golden Goose Award.
The award, presented by a coaltion of academic and science organizations, recognizes individuals whose federally funded research has proven to have significant societal and economic benefits — even if it seemed to have few practical applications when first published.
Shapley was honored, together with economist Alvin Roth and the late mathematician David Gale, for research that ultimately served as the basis for a national kidney exchange in the U.S., a program that matches new medical residents and hospitals, and numerous other applications.
The other award recipients, microbiologist Thomas Brock and glycobiologist Hudson Freeze, were acknowledged for work that contributed to the growth of biotechnology and genomics.
They will be honored at a ceremony Sept. 19 in Washington, D.C.
"We've all read stories about the study with the wacky title, the research project from left field," said U.S. Rep. Jim Cooper, whose proposal in Congress led to the creation of the award. "But off-the-wall science yields medical miracles. We can't abandon research funding only because we can't predict how the next miracle will happen."
The Golden Goose Awards were established in 2012 by the American Association for the Advancement of Sciences, the Association of American Universities and the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities, and other organizations that support basic scientific research.
Shapley joined the UCLA faculty in 1981 and is widely considered one of the fathers of game theory. His research has focused on non-cooperative market models, political games, cost allocation and organization theory.
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