Professor Edmund S. Phelps obtained his PhD from Yale University in 1959. Since 1982 he has been McVickar Professor of Political Economy at Columbia University. Professor Phelps has served as consultant of the Treasury Department, Senate Finance Committee, and Federal Reserve Board of the United States.

Professor Phelps was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in the United States in 1981. In 2000, he was made a Distinguished Fellow of the American Economic Association and has served as its Vice-President. He is also a fellow of the Econometric Society, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the New York Academy of Sciences, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.

Professor Phelps has received honorary degrees from a number of universities. They include his alma mater, Amherst College (1985), University of Mannheim (2001), Tor Vergata University in Rome (2001), Universidade Nova de Lisboa (2003), University of Paris Dauphine (2004) and University of Iceland (2004). In 2004, he was made an honorary professor at the Renmin University in Beijing.

Professor Phelps' monumental contribution to economics includes introducing imperfect information and imperfect knowledge to macroeconomics. He pioneered the first generation of economic models of unemployment and inflation based on microfoundations, and was the first to stress the importance of reorganizing macroeconomic theory by revising the postulates of the neoclassical paradigm with regard to information and knowledge and to show how this could actually be done. This contribution has been of fundamental importance, not only to the development of macroeconomics over the past three decades but to much of the most exciting work at the current research frontier.