She was born in Boston, Massachusetts and lived there her whole life until she moved to Israel in 2012, where she joined the Hebrew university’s economics department. She earned all of her degrees at the prestigious Harvard University where she studied economics.
Her dad was a professor of economics so she grew up already with the mindset of an economist. By the age of six, her dad was already reading her stories from The Economist and translating them into terms a kid could understand. In addition to economics, Naomi says that a big part of her identity is as an athlete, playing sports such as competitive tennis and soccer, along with swimming every day. At first, when she began her first degree, she wanted to become a sports medicine doctor due to the fact that her and her siblings would get sport related injuries and she always felt that the Orthopedist or the physician lacked the complete set of knowledge required. However, after shadowing a doctor and seeing the same knee injury several times that morning, she left at lunch and never came back, finding the whole process a bit boring. She continued economics and found herself drawn more and more into that world (thanks in part to one of her instructors, a PHD student who was teaching her in her sophomore year).
Hausman didn’t expect to move to Israel. She did however, have a strong emotional connection to the country due to the fact that her parents took her many times to Israel to visit and a number of family members lived there. She describes that after her PhD, she visited many different departments in the US where she didn’t feel comfortable in. When she visited the departments in Israel, she immediately clicked with the people and it felt very natural.
When asked why she moved from the economics department to the business school, Dr. Hausman said: “Business schools are a good fit for someone who does research on innovation and entrepreneurship. Additionally, I really like and connect with the people in the school.”
