Elinor Ostrom,78, a research professor at Arizona State University who won the Nobel Prize in economics in 2009 and was named among Time magazine's 100 most influential people of 2012, died June 12 at IU Health Hospital in Bloomington, Indiana. Ostrom, the founding director of the Center for the Study of Institutional Diversity at ASU, was a scholarly giant in the social sciences and notably the field of economic governance. "The world has lost a pioneer in systems level thinking in the social sciences," said ASU President Michael M. Crow. “Lin Ostrom was a wonderful example of not only a brilliant scientist who had a huge impact on her discipline and other disciplines but also someone who with all her accolades, remained modest, helpful to everybody who needed her help,” said Sander van der Leeuw, dean of ASU’s School of Sustainability. “She battled all the time in favor of transdisciplinarity, under sometimes very difficult circumstances.” Marco Janssen, an ASU colleague and director of the Center for the Study of Institutional Diversity said. In addition to her research appointment at ASU, Ostrom had an academic home at Indiana University in Bloomington, where she was a Distinguished Professor and Arthur F. Bentley Professor of Political Science. She is survived by her husband and colleague, Vincent, who together shared their research and ideas with colleagues at IU’s Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis, recently renamed in their honor. Ostrom received doctoral, master’s and bachelor’s degrees in political science from UCLA. She was a member of the National Academy of Sciences and a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. At ASU, in addition to her role as founding director for the Center for the Study of Institutional Diversity, Ostrom was a Distinguished Sustainability Scientist at the Global Institute of Sustainability and a research professor in the School of Human Evolution and Social Change in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.