Paul Dolan is Professor of Behavioural Science at the London School of Economics and Political Science

About Paul

Like generations of his family before him, Paul was born in Hackney. Apart from a year training to be a chartered accountant, which he really did not enjoy, Paul has been an academic all his working life. He got his doctorate from the University of York in 1997, entitled “Issues in the valuation of health outcomes”. He retains a keen interest in valuing the hard to measure stuff. He became a full Professor at the University of Sheffield in 2000. He enjoyed living in the North of England, not least because he was near to some of the best clubs at the time, including Gatecrasher in Sheffield.

Paul won a Philip Leverhulme Prize for Economics in 2002 for his contribution to health economics and went to an economics of happiness conference in Milan in the same year. This was to prove career changing. He met Danny Kahneman and Richard Layard. He worked with the former at Princeton in 2004/5 and, after a stint at Imperial College from 2006 to 2010, joined Richard at LSE in 2010. Working back in London meant that Paul was able to get a season ticket to watch West Ham, who remain a source of moments of joy and long periods of misery.

Paul’s 120-odd academic papers have been cited over 33,000 times. In the past decade, he has two written best-selling popular science books, started a new Executive Masters in Behavioural Science at LSE, and created a new department of Psychological and Behavioural Science at LSE. He lives in Brighton – or “Hove, actually” - with his wife and two teenage children. He is creating a “Happy Campus” at the British Engineerium in Hove with the entrepreneur Luke Johnson. Come and check it out.