Daniel Goroff, Vice President and Program Director at the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, has been elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Goroff, who joins more than 250 outstanding individuals across the sciences and humanities elected to the Academy in 2026, was selected for his scientific, cultural, and nonprofit leadership. He will be inducted at a ceremony in Cambridge, Massachusetts in October.

Goroff joined the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation in 2008. He leads the Foundation’s grantmaking activities in Economics and oversees the prestigious Sloan Research Fellowships program, which provides unrestricted support for outstanding early-career researchers across seven disciplines.

In addition to his work at the Sloan Foundation, Goroff has served three appointments at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy — most recently working there as Deputy Director for Science and Society in 2023. He is also Professor Emeritus of Mathematics and Economics at Harvey Mudd College, where he served as Dean of the Faculty and Vice President for Academic Affairs. Before that, he taught at Harvard University for over 20 years.

Goroff’s research interests include decision-making under uncertainty, optimization over time, 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.

Goroff earned his B.A.-M.A. degree summa cum laude in Mathematics as a Borden Scholar at Harvard, an M.Phil. in Economics as a Churchill Scholar at Cambridge University, a Masters in Mathematical Finance as an HMC Scholar at Boston University, and a Ph.D. in Mathematics at Princeton University as a Danforth Fellow.

Founded in 1780, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences honors excellence and convenes leaders from every field of human endeavor to address issues of importance to the nation and the world and work together “to cultivate every art and science which may tend to advance the interest, honor, dignity, and happiness of a free, independent, and virtuous people.”