Paul DiMaggio and Anoop Prasad Join IAS Board of Trustees

The Institute for Advanced Study has appointed Paul DiMaggio (Professor of Sociology at New York University) and Anoop Prasad (Managing Director and member of the Executive Committee of D. E. Shaw & Co.) to its Board of Trustees. The appointments were unanimously adopted by the Board on October 26, 2024.

Both DiMaggio and Prasad have well-established connections to IAS. DiMaggio was the Princeton Foundation for Peace & Learning Founders’ Circle Member (2017–18) in the School of Social Science. During his time at IAS, he worked on a book that developed a framework for the social-scientific study of culture, integrating recent research in social cognition and cognitive neuroscience. Prasad is a longtime supporter of the Institute, has served on the Friends Executive Committee from 2018–24, and is the son of the distinguished mathematician Gopal Prasad, a six-time Member of the Institute, for whom the Prasad family endowed a professorship in the Schools of Mathematics and Natural Sciences in 2022.

As Trustees, DiMaggio and Prasad will bring expertise stemming from the worlds of academia, finance, and philanthropy. Their participation will be of great value to advancing the IAS mission—an endeavor to which they have already contributed much.

Paul DiMaggio is a Professor of Sociology at New York University, where he has taught since 2016. He is also affiliated with NYU’s Center for Data Science, the Stern School of Business, and the Wagner School of Public Service. He holds a Ph.D. from Harvard University and a bachelor’s degree from Swarthmore College.

DiMaggio’s research spans organizational analysis, the sociology of art and culture, and social inequality. He has published more than 125 scholarly papers and book chapters on topics including the origins and consequences of cultural hierarchy, cultural and political polarization, the role of social networks in economic exchange, and the relationship between science and religion. Much of his work focuses on the United States. His notable publications include The New Institutionalism in Organizational Analysis (1991), Race, Ethnicity and Participation in the Arts (1992), and The 21st-Century Firm: Changing Economic Organization in International Perspective (2001). Currently, he is studying innovative approaches to studying attitude data, cognitive aspects of cultural change, and the relationship between Americans' attitudes toward science and religion.

DiMaggio served on the faculty at Princeton University (1996–2016), where he holds an emeritus position, and Yale University (1979–92). DiMaggio has received several honors for his work, including being elected to the American Philosophical Society, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Academy of Political and Social Science, and the National Academy of Sciences.

Anoop Prasad is a Managing Director and member of the Executive Committee of D. E. Shaw & Co. and jointly oversees the D. E. Shaw group’s worldwide businesses. Prasad is also a member of the firm’s risk committee, which is responsible for firm-wide risk management and capital allocation, and he jointly oversees the firm’s global trading and information technology platforms. In addition, he serves as Global Head of Systematic Equities, in which capacity he oversees the research, development, implementation, and trading of the firm’s alternative quantitative equity strategies. Prasad joined the D. E. Shaw group in 1997 after earning his doctoral degree in theoretical physics from the California Institute of Technology. His graduate work focused on exotic states of matter such as superfluidity and superconductivity and involved the extensive application of computational methods. Prasad received his B.Sc. in physics from the University of Bombay in 1991.

Prasad and his spouse, Sangeeta, are active philanthropists. Notably, they have established the Indu and Gopal Prasad Family Fund at the University of Michigan to support graduate students in the Department of Mathematics.

About the Institute

The Institute for Advanced Study has served as one of the leading independent centers for theoretical research and intellectual inquiry since its establishment in 1930, advancing the frontiers of knowledge across the sciences and humanities. From founding IAS Faculty Albert Einstein, Erwin Panofsky, and John von Neumann to influential figures Emmy Noether, George Kennan, and J. Robert Oppenheimer to the foremost thinkers of the present, IAS is dedicated to enabling independent inquiry and fundamental discovery.

Each year, the Institute welcomes more than 250 of the world’s most promising post-doctoral researchers and scholars who are selected and mentored by a permanent Faculty, all of whom are preeminent leaders in their fields. Among present and past Faculty and Members, there have been 36 Nobel Laureates, 46 of the 64 Fields Medalists, and 23 of the 27 Abel Prize Laureates, as well as winners of the Turing Award; the Pulitzer Prize in History; the Wolf, Holberg, and Kluge prizes; and many MacArthur and Guggenheim fellows, among other honors.