Professor Qian was born in Beijing and graduated from Tsinghua University in Mathematics. He received his Ph.D. in Economics from Harvard University after earning an M.Phil. in Management Science/Operations Research from Yale University and an M.A. in Statistics from Columbia University. He was on the economics faculties at Stanford University, the University of Maryland, and the University of California, Berkeley. He was the Dean of the School of Economics and Management at Tsinghua University in 2006-2018. Professor Qian was elected as Fellow of the Econometric Society in 2012 and as inaugural Distinguished Professor of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences at Tsinghua University in 2018. He was a recipient of the 2009 Sun Yefang Prize in Economic Sciences and the inaugural 2016 China Economics Prize. His main research areas include comparative economics, institutional economics, economics of transition and the Chinese economy.