Daniel Goroff

Daniel Goroff serves as Senior Advisor to the President & CEO at the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. He is also President & CEO of the Social Science Research Council (SSRC). He is a particularly passionate patron of rigorous and policy-relevant research in the social sciences. He has also served in various roles at the White House, most recently as the Deputy Director for Science and Society at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy in 2023.

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 economics, physics, engineering, and history of science, as well as a pioneering course on “Decisions, Games, and Negotiations.”

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. 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. He also 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, to the Board of Trustees of Smith College in 2016, and to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2026.