Holger Motzkau · CC BY-SA 3.0

Spent 47 years at Indiana University showing, against the prevailing economic wisdom of her time, that communities can manage shared resources — fisheries, irrigation systems, forests — sustainably on their own, without either government regulation or privatization. That research, built through a self-founded workshop that mixed disciplines instead of one university department, made her the first woman to win the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, in 2009.