Kamer Daron Acemoğlu is a Turkish-American economist of Armenian descent, born on September 3, 1967, in Istanbul, Turkey. He has been a faculty member at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) since 1993, where he currently holds the title of the Elizabeth and James Killian Professor of Economics and was named an Institute Professor at MIT in 2019.

In 2005, Acemoğlu received the prestigious John Bates Clark Medal, a testament to his significant impact on the field of economics. He was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 2024, alongside James A. Robinson and Simon Johnson, for their comparative studies on prosperity between states and empires.

Acemoğlu is regarded as a centrist, with a focus on institutions, poverty, and econometrics. He ranked third in a 2011 survey among American economists in the list of "Favorite Living Economists Under Age 60", following Paul Krugman and Greg Mankiw. As of 2015, he was recognized as the most cited economist of the previous decade according to Research Papers in Economics (RePEc) data. According to the Open Syllabus Project, he is the third most frequently cited author on college syllabi for economics courses, after Mankiw and Krugman.

Acemoğlu is also well-known for his influential book, Why Nations Fail, published in 2011, which sparked significant debate on economic growth and development. He is a co-director of the MIT Shaping the Future of Work Initiative, along with Simon Johnson and David Autor.