A pioneer in optimal tax theory, Professor Sir James Mirrlees was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences in 1996 in recognition of his fundamental contributions to the economic theory of incentives under asymmetric information. He was knighted in 1997.

After graduating in mathematics from the University of Edinburgh in 1957, Professor Mirrlees went to Trinity College, Cambridge, initially to do mathematics; and received his PhD in Economics in 1963. From 1968 to 1995 he was Edgeworth Professor of Economics at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Nuffield College. From 1995 to 2003, he served as Professor of Political Economy at the University of Cambridge. He has been Distinguished Professor-at-Large at CUHK since 2002. Professor Mirrlees has also held visiting professorships at MIT, UC Berkeley, Yale, Melbourne and Peking University.