He’s been teaching for nearly 30 years but still gets a charge out of walking into a classroom full of students who are eager to learn. Dr. Peter Toumanoff matches his students’ commitment to work hard with a promise to push them harder.

The equation works. Students come out of his classes understanding exactly how to apply the tools of micro theory to economics questions.

“I think it’s very important, especially in my discipline, to give students the tools to do analyses themselves. There are so many questions that you can use economic theories to answer. I can’t teach them all of the questions so I teach them how to use the tools to address the questions themselves,” he says.

“Economics is all about the choices that people and firms make on a daily basis. Every time we make a choice, we are actually behaving in a way that economic theories are capable of explaining. I can look at the world through an economist’s eyes and understand why things have occurred or forecast what the effects may be. I want to give my students the same abilities. The world is flooded with data but it doesn’t have a lot of people who can make sense of the data. Our grads can. And that’s a scarce commodity.”