Roland G. Fryer Jr.

Fryer faced complaints of sexual harassment in 2018. A Harvard investigation found that Fryer engaged in "unwelcome conduct of a sexual nature" with female employees of his research lab. Fryer resigned from the American Economic Association (AEA) Executive Committee in December following media reports of the investigation. On July 10, 2019, the Boston Globe reported that Fryer has been suspended for two years without pay by Harvard after the university's Office for Dispute Resolution concluded that Fryer “engaged in unwelcome sexual conduct toward several individuals, resulting in the creation of a hostile work environment over the course of several years".

In 2016, Fryer published a paper concluding that although minorities (African Americans and Hispanics) are more likely to experience police use of force than whites, they were not more likely to be shot by police than whites. The study generated considerable controversy and criticism.

Fryer grew up in Lewisville, Texas, where he had moved with his abusive father at the age of 4. Attending Lewisville High School, he starred in football and basketball, earning an athletic scholarship from the University of Texas at Arlington. However, he never actually played for the Texas–Arlington Mavericks; instead he decided to embrace academics, joining the Honors College, whose dean helped find him an academic scholarship. He graduated magna cum laude in 1998 after two and a half years while holding down a full-time job. Fryer completed his Ph.D. in economics from Penn State in 2002. He conducted postdoctoral research at the University of Chicago with Nobel laureate economist Gary Becker. Fryer has collaborated with several other academics, including Steven Levitt, the University of Chicago economist and author of Freakonomics, Glenn Loury, a Brown University economist, and Edward Glaeser, an urban economist at Harvard.

In 2008 The Economist listed Fryer as one of the top eight young economists in the world. In 2011, Fryer was a recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, commonly referred to as a "Genius Grant". He is the recipient of the 2015 John Bates Clark Medal, awarded by the American Economic Association to "that American economist under the age of forty who is judged to have made the most significant contribution to economic thought and knowledge."

He maintains offices at the National Bureau of Economic Research and W. E. B. Du Bois Institute. In 2007, at age 30, he became the youngest African-American to ever receive tenure at Harvard. He was named a 2011 MacArthur Fellow and received the 2015 John Bates Clark Medal. Fryer is widely regarded to be one of black America and Harvard's rising stars, having published numerous economics-related papers in prominent academic journals over the past few years. The New York Times ran an extensive profile of Fryer, entitled "Toward a Unified Theory of Black America," in March 2005 that dealt extensively with Fryer's rough upbringing: Fryer's mother left when he was very young, and his father, who beat his son, was convicted of rape, effectively leaving Fryer to fend for himself. Fryer became a "full fledged gangster by his teens".

Fryer is married to Franziska Michor, a Harvard mathematician with a PhD in evolutionary biology. They met in 2006, as members of the Harvard Society of Fellows. He "courted her by betting a dinner date on whether he could find evidence that smoking reduces cancer; to her dismay, he sent her a report from the tobacco lobby." They have a 4 year old daughter.

Upon completing a three-year fellowship with the Harvard Society of Fellows at the end of the 2005–2006 academic year, Fryer joined Harvard's economics department as an assistant professor. In 2005, Fryer was also selected as one of the first Fletcher Foundation Fellows.

Roland Gerhard Fryer Jr. (born June 4, 1977) is an American economist. In 2007, at age 30, he became the youngest African-American to ever receive tenure at Harvard.. In 2019, Fryer was suspended from Harvard for two years following sexual harassment claims. Harvard also stripped him of his honorary chaired 'Henry Lee Professor of Economics' professorship, demoting him to regular full professor instead.