Daniel Goroff is Vice President and Program Director at the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, a private charity that supports breakthroughs in science, technology, and economics. A former Division Director for Social and Economic Sciences at the National Science Foundation (NSF) and former Division Director at the National Research Council (NRC), Goroff has twice worked for the President’s Science Advisor in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), most recently as Assistant Director for Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences. 

Daniel Goroff is Professor Emeritus of Mathematics and Economics at Harvey Mudd College in Claremont, where he also served as Dean of the Faculty and Vice President for Academic Affairs. During twenty years before that at Harvard University, he rose in rank from Assistant Professor of Mathematics to Professor of the Practice and Associate Director of the Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning. A winner of the Phi Beta Kappa Award—the highest recognition for educational excellence in Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Science—Goroff not only developed and taught courses in mathematics, but also in physics, economics, engineering, and history of science, as well as a pioneering course on “Decisions, Games, and Negotiations” that was popular online, too. The Masters Program he founded and directed at Harvard on “Mathematics for Teaching” still enrolls dozens of degree candidates each year. 

Daniel Goroff’s research interests include optimization over time, decision-making under uncertainty, the mathematics of privacy, and the economics of science. He has held extended visiting positions at Bell Laboratories in New Jersey, the Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques in Paris, the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute in Berkeley, the Dibner Institute at MIT, Columbia University’s Teachers College, and the Bellagio Residency Program for Academic Writing in Italy. Books he edited include one on Science and Engineering Careers with Richard Freeman and another three-volume translation with an extended introduction for Henri Poincaré’s Les Méthodes Nouvelles de la Mécanique Céleste. 

Daniel Goroff earned an B.A.-M.A. summa cum laude in Mathematics as a Borden Scholar at Harvard in 1978, an M.Phil. in Economics as a Churchill Scholar at Cambridge University in 1979, a Masters in Mathematical Finance as an HMC Scholar at Boston University in 2008, a Ph.D. in Mathematics at Princeton University as a Danforth Fellow in 1984, and completed an Executive Education Program for Nonprofit Leaders at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business in 2013. He was elected to the Faculty Council at Harvard in 1991, to the Board of Directors of the American Association for Higher Education in 1994, to the Board of Directors of the Global Legal Entity Identifier Foundation in 2016, and to the Board of Trustees of Smith College in 2016.

Daniel Goroff has presented Congressional testimony about science policy before both the House and the Senate. A Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, he helped found the Science Philanthropy Alliance, the Research on Research Institute, and the Societal Experts Action Network. For his support of research on data science and economic measurement, Goroff won the American Statistical Association’s 2020 Links Lecture Award.