Joanne Roberts is the third President and Professor of Social Sciences (Economics) at Yale-NUS College, the first liberal arts college in Singapore. She is also a Professor at the National University of Singapore, Department of Economics.
Roberts obtained her bachelor's degree in Economics from the University of Waterloo in 1993. She earned both her Master's and PhD degrees in Economics from Queen's University in 1995 and 1998, respectively.
She is a Canadian citizen and held multiple leadership positions in the Economics profession in Canada prior to her move to Singapore.
Academic career
Roberts started her academic career as an Assistant Professor at University of Toronto, Department of Economics in 1998 and was promoted to Associate Professor in 2004. She then joined University of Calgary as an Associate Professor in 2008, Canada Research Chair in the Economics of Organizations from 2009 to 2014, and became a full Professor in 2012. She was a Senior Visiting Fellow at the National University of Singapore in 2011 and 2015 where she taught modules such as Law and Economics and Intermediate Microeconomics.
Her career at Yale-NUS begain in 2015 where she joined as a visiting professor. Roberts served as the Associate Dean of Faculty in 2017 and Executive Vice President (Academic Affairs) in 2018. She played a role in developing new student life policies and practices and in overseeing the recruitment, tenure and promotion of faculty of the College.
Upon Tan Tai Yong's completion of his full-five year presidential term at Yale-NUS in 2022, Roberts was appointed as the College's third President and started her presidential term at Yale-NUS on 1 July 2022.
Research
Roberts is a public economist who has a keen interest in how incentives affect behaviour in a broad number of situations. Her recent work has focused on legal institutions, tax evasion and charitable giving.
She was affiliated with the Centre interuniversitaire sur le risque, les politiques economiques et l’emploi (CIRPEE) from 2002 to 2011, and the Candian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR) from 2001 to 2009.
Roberts was the co-editor of the Canadian Journal of Economics from 2010 to 2014, and the Associate Editor of the Australian Economic Review in 2017.
Community service
Roberts was a board member of the Calgary Immigrant Women's Association (CIWA) from 2010 to 2011. CIWA is an organisation that is dedicated to engage and integrate immigrant and their families in the community.
She is currently an Advisory Council member of NINEby9, an initiative launched in Singapore with the focus on driving gender equality within organisations.
Since 2022, Roberts has been a volunteer at Willing Hearts, a charity that operates a soup kitchen that prepares, cooks and distributes daily meals in Singapore.
Awards and honours
In 2001, Roberts was named as one of the Polanyi Prize Winners by the Council of Ontario Universities. The prizes are awarded annually to early-career researches who are either continuing postdoctoral work or have recently gained a faculty appointment and in honour of Ontario's Nobel Prize winner, John C. Polanyi.
Her article on the Journal of Law, Economics, and Organisation (JLEO) titled "Rehabilitated or Not: An Informational Theory of Parole Decisions" was the runner-up for the Oliver E. Williamson Prize for Best Article in 2011.