The only woman to win a Nobel Prize for economics, Elinor Ostrom had the common touch. She is an ardent champion of the idea that people will learn to share and thrive if given the opportunity. She received her Nobel in 2009 for her analyses of how individuals and communities can manage common resources–fisheries, or information systems–as well as or better than markets, companies or governments. She first began to explore this line of work in her Ph.D. dissertation at UCLA. In 2012 Time Magazine named her one of the world’s 100 most influential people. She spent her long career at Indiana University in Bloomington, where she and her husband evolved the “Bloomington school” of political economy based on the concept of resource management at multiple levels.