President Claudine Gay welcomes you to the 2023-2024 academic year.
Sep 5, 2023
Early life and education[edit]
Gay grew up the child of Haitian immigrants, who came to the United States over fifty years ago and met in New York City as students. Her mother studied nursing and her father studied engineering.[4] Gay spent much of her childhood first in New York City, and then in Saudi Arabia, where her father worked for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers,[5] while her mother was a registered nurse.[5]
Gay attended Phillips Exeter Academy, a private boarding school in Exeter, New Hampshire,[6]and then attended Stanford University, where she studied economics. She received the Anna Laura Myers Prize for best undergraduate thesis in economics and graduated in 1992.[5] Gay then earned her Ph.D. in 1998 from Harvard University, where she won the university's Toppan Prize for best dissertation in political science.[7]
