James D. Hamilton has been a professor in the Economics Department at the University of California at San Diego since 1992, where he currently holds the Robert F. Engle endowed chair in economics. He served as department chair from 1999-2002, and has also taught at Harvard University and the University of Virginia. He received a Ph.D. in economics from the University of California at Berkeley in 1983. 

Professor Hamilton has published on a wide range of topics. His research in areas including econometrics, business cycles, monetary policy, and energy markets has been cited in more than 60,000 different articles. His graduate textbook on time series analysis has sold 60,000 copies and has been translated into Chinese, Japanese, and Italian. He also contributes to Econbrowser, a popular economics blog. Academic honors include Research Associate with the National Bureau of Economic Research, receipt of the Best Paper Award for 2010-2011 from the International Institute of Forecasters, and 2014 award for Outstanding Contributions to the Profession from the International Association for Energy Economics.

He is a Fellow of the Econometric Society and the Journal of Econometrics and a Founding Fellow of the International Association for Applied Econometrics.