Michelle Jo White

Professor Michelle White of UC San Diego, born in 1945 in Washington D.C. and raised in Bethesda, Md., graduated from Radcliffe College in 1967. She was only the second woman to receive a Ph.D. in economics from Princeton University. She then became the first tenure-track female faculty member at the University of Pennsylvania, followed by tenured positions at the Stern School at NYU, the University of Michigan, and finally the University of California at San Diego. Throughout her career, she served as an active mentor and role model for younger women faculty members and graduate students, hoping to increase the representation and recognition of women in the profession.

During her long career, she held many visiting professorships around the world -- she loved to travel and experience different cultures, keeping an ever dwindling list of the countries she never got to. In one of her first professional positions abroad, working in a U.S. sponsored aid program in Pakistan, she was the only woman working in the entire Pakistani government. The most memorable position for her was her time teaching in the Ford-Foundation-sponsored training program at the People’s University in Beijing back in 1986. She also taught at the New School of Economics in Moscow, and held research positions at over a dozen different schools and various governments in the U.S., Europe, and Asia. She was also a Research Associate of the NBER and a founding board member and past president of the American Law and Economics Association.

She was a renowned expert on the law and economics of personal, corporate, and even sovereign bankruptcies, as well as an early leader in urban economics.

Michelle White succumbed to pancreatic cancer on April 18 2025, nine years after her initial diagnosis, demonstrating remarkable courage, determination and resilience over the course of her various surgeries, radiation treatments, and well over a hundred chemotherapy treatments. We are grateful to Dr. Paul Fanta of UCSD Oncology for his many years of inspired, dedicated and compassionate care.

She was also an avid hiker and backpacker, with hiking trips all over the world.

She leaves behind her husband, Roger Gordon, her sister Margo Ogus and brother-in-law Roy Ogus of Palo Alto, a niece Amanda and brother-in-law Elliot of Seattle and a nephew Simon and sister-in-law Leslie of Gareth Park in Maryland, their three children, as well as a large and closely-linked extended family scattered all over the U.S.

In lieu of flowers, donations would be welcome to the Nature Conservancy, her favorite charity.