Sir James Mirrlees was Emeritus Professor of Political Economy at the University of Cambridge and Master of Morningside College at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.  His work in microeconomics is deemed to be world-renowned. During the 1960s and 1970s he worked on the theory of public economic policy which would eventually earn him the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1996 (alongside William Vickrey) for their pathbreaking work on the economic theory of incentives under asymmetric information.