Noted Indian-American economist Adhip Chaudhuri, who recently retired from a prestigious US university has died, his family said.
Chaudhuri, 62, who retired from the Georgetown University, passed away on January 13 from lung cancer complications.
In his research and writing, he applied philosopher John Rawls's seminal work on social justice to measurable economic social welfare indices.
Born in Ghazipur in Uttar Pradesh state on July 25, 1951, to Sabitri and N K Chaudhuri, he was the youngest among four children.
Chaudhuri attended Narendrapur Ramakrishna Mission high school in Calcutta (now Kolkata), graduating in 1967 with high honors in state-wide examinations.
later he attended St Stephen's College, Delhi University, where he graduated in 1970 with honours in Economics at the top of both his class and the university.
He pursued post-graduate studies at the Delhi School of Economics and Columbia University, New York, where he obtained a PhD in economics with his dissertation, "Envy, Distributive Justice, and Social Choice."
His thesis advisers were Nobel Prizewinning economists William Vickery and Edmund Phelps.
His areas of specialisation were welfare economics, international economics, and the history of economic thought.
He began teaching at Georgetown University in Washington, DC, in 1979.
An exceptionally gifted teacher known for his ability to make difficult concepts understandable and relevant to his students' lives, he was recognised as teacher of the year three times.
Chaudhuri taught and lectured internationally, in Vienna, Hanoi, and Doha, Qatar.
His writings on international trade, finance, and social welfare appeared in such academic journals as Theory and Decision and Social Choice and Welfare and in The Multinational Corporation in the 1980s, edited by Charles P Kindleberger and David Audretsch, published by the MIT Press in 1983.
A passionate bridge and tennis player and an avid gardener, he is survived by his wife, Joanne Kinney Smyth, his children, Maya and Neal, his former wives, Una Chaudhuri and Margaret McBride, and his brother Pradip, and sister Shibani in Kolkata.
