Roland Gerhard Fryer, Junior. is an American economist and the Henry Lee Professor of Economics at Harvard University.
Background
The New York Times ran an extensive profile of Fryer, entitled "Toward a Unified Theory of Black America," in March 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, effectively leaving Fryer to fend for himself.
Education
Pennsylvania State University. University of Texas at Arlington.
Career
He also maintains offices at the National Bureau of Economic Research and West. East. B. Du Bois Institute. 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. Fryer became a "full fledged gangster by his teens".
Attending Lewisville High School, he starred in football and basketball, earning an athletic scholarship from the University of Texas at Arlington.
However, he never actually played for the Texas–Arlington Mavericks. Instead he decided to embrace academics, joining the Honors College, whose dean helped find him an academic scholarship.
He graduated magna cum laude in 1998 after two and a half years while holding down a full-time job. Fryer completed his Doctor of Philosophy in economics from Penn State in 2002.
He also conducted postdoctoral research 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 Fletcher Foundation Fellows. Recently, Fryer has begun work on the Opportunity New York City project, which will study how students in low-performing schools respond to financial incentives.
Fryer is currently working as the Chief Executive Officer of the Education Innovation Laboratory at Harvard University.
In 2008 The Economist listed Fryer as one of the top eight young economists in the world. In 2011, Fryer was a recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, commonly referred to as a "Genius Grant".