Sanjaya Lall Lecture 2026 with Sendhil Mullainathan

The Oxford Department of Economics is pleased to host the Sanjaya Lall Lecture 2026, delivered by Visiting Professor Sendhil Mullainathan, Peter de Florez Professor at MIT. The event will take place at 17:00 - 18:30 on Tuesday 26 May 2026 and will be followed by a drinks reception for in-person attendees.

Do Large Language Models Understand? How Would We Know? Does it Matter if They Do?

Where: Lecture Theatre, Manor Road Building, Oxford

When: Tuesday 26 May 2026, 17:00 - 18:30

 

RSVP here

 

More about this lecture: What LLMs can and cannot do is obviously a question of great interest. It seems, however, to be one best answered by computer scientists. Sendhil will argue differently: that economists are uniquely suited to answer these questions.

 

About the speaker

 

Sendhil Mullainathan

Sendhil Mullainathan

Sendhil Mullainathan is the Peter de Florez Professor at MIT, splitting his time between the Economics and the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science departments. His current research is at the intersection of algorithms and people, with a central focus on launching The Bike Shop @ MIT. A new research center which works towards more human-centered AI through scalable bicycles for the mind, and innovative new gears for machine learning algorithms. 

He enjoys writing, having co-authored Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much as well as having written regularly for the New York Times. 

He is active in the application of research insights. He helped co-found a non-profit to apply behavioral science (ideas42); co-founded a center to promote the use of randomized control trials in development (the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab), and co-founded Dandelion Health, a company that provides the healthcare data needed to build breakthrough medical AI. He also serves on the board of the MacArthur Foundation and, has worked in government in various roles. 

Sendhil has recently returned to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology –where he began his academic career- as a Professor of Economics and Peter de Flores Professor of EECS. Prior to returning to MIT Sendhil was the Roman Family University Professor of Computation and Behavioral Science at Chicago Booth, before which he was the Robert C. Waggoner Professor of Economics in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University. 

He is a recipient of the MacArthur “genius” Award, is a winner of the Infosys Prize, has been designated a “Young Global Leader” by the World Economic Forum, labeled a “Top 100 Thinker” by Foreign Policy Magazine, and named to the “Smart List: 50 people who will change the world” by Wired Magazine (UK). 

 

About Professor Sanjaya Lall (1940 - 2005)

 

 

The Sanjaya Lall Visiting Professorship at the University of Oxford was created to honour the memory and academic legacy of Professor Sanjaya Lall (1940 - 2005). The distinguished scholarship scheme has run for over a decade, inviting some of the most prestigious international Economists to the University of Oxford.

Sanjaya Lall was a development economist and Professor of Economics at the University of Oxford. Lall's research interests included the impact of foreign direct investment in developing countries, the economics of multi-national corporations, and the development of technological capability and industrial competitiveness in developing countries. One of the world's pre-eminent development economists, Lall was also one of the founding editors of the journal Oxford Development Studies and a senior economist at the World Bank (1965–68 and 1985–87).