Hector Tzavellas named H.H.H. Faculty Fellow in Economics
Hector Tzavellas, assistant professor of economics in the College of Science at Virginia Tech, has been named the H.H.H. Faculty Fellow in Economics by the Virginia Tech Board of Visitors.
The H.H.H. Faculty Fellowship in Economics was established in the Department of Economics through a gift from Hans H. Haller, who began his career at Virginia Tech in 1986. Haller established the Fellowship to provide support to an outstanding faculty member, with a preference for junior or early-career faculty.
Recipients hold the title of H.H.H. Faculty Fellow in Economics for a period of two years.
A member of the Virginia Tech faculty since 2021, Tzavellas is a theorist working on network theory – a rapidly growing field of research with wide applications for analyzing economic behaviors and outcomes. His research is at the intersection of games on networks with incomplete information, endogenous network formation, and the macroeconomic and financial impacts of single or multi-layered connectivity. He has published three papers including one in the International Economic Review, a prominent general-interest economics journal.
His current research focuses on network games under incomplete information. Most research in network theory assumes that players have complete information about the network, which is an inaccurate representation of reality. His research proposes a new mechanism to establish the existence and uniqueness of an optimal set of strategies for any pattern of uncertainty that individuals may have over the true architecture of the network. This contribution to network theory has received attention among leading experts in the field.
Tzavellas has served as a reviewer for several academic journals and he co-organized the National Science Foundation-funded annual network conference hosted by Virginia Tech in 2022 and the Washington Area Network Economics Symposium. He has been active in the supervision of doctoral students and currently co-chairs the committee of one Ph.D. student and serves on several other dissertation committees.
Tzavellas received his bachelor’s degree and master’s degree from Boston University, a master’s degree from Imperial College of London, and a Ph.D. from the George Washington University.
