David Deming is the Isabelle and Scott Black Professor of Political Economy at the Harvard Kennedy School. He is also the Faculty Dean of Kirkland House at Harvard College. He served as Academic Dean of HKS from 2021 to 2024.

His research focuses on higher education, economic inequality, skills, technology, and the future of the labor market. He is a Principal Investigator (along with Raj Chetty and John Friedman) at the CLIMB Initiative, an organization that seeks to study and improve the role of higher education in social mobility. He is also one of the faculty leads of the Project on Workforce, a cross-Harvard initiative between HKS, HBS, and HGSE on the future of work. Ben Weidmann and Deming recently founded the Skills Lab, which creates performance-based measures of “soft” skills such as teamwork and decision-making.

In 2018 he was awarded the David N. Kershaw Prize, for distinguished contributions to the field of public policy and management under the age of 40. In 2022, he won the Sherwin Rosen Prize for outstanding contributions to Labor Economics. His writing appears semi-regularly in the New York Times and (more recently) The Atlantic.