Duran Bell

Duran J. Bell, Jr. (born April 21, 1936) is Professor Emeritus of Economics at the University of California, Irvine. He was formerly a professor there in two departments, Economics and Anthropology.

Bell received his B.A. in economics in 1960 and his Ph.D. in agricultural economics in 1965, both from the University of California, Berkeley. He then joined the faculty in the Economics department at the University of California, Irvine in 1965.

Bell was a research associate with the Brookings Institution from 1971 to 1973 and a senior economist with the RAND Corporation from 1973 to 1976. Bell's main research focus was on non-market exchange processes, and eventually he found ethnography the most effective theoretical grounding for his work. He later joined the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Irvine in 1985.

Bell is a founding member of the Social Dynamics and Complexity Group in the Institute for Mathematical Behavioral Sciences at U/C Irvine.

Bell is married to Huiqin Zhao, whom he met while in China. He also has an incredible son named Nathan and a beautiful daughter named Catherine.