Lisa Cook (Federal Reserve Governor)

Cook was born and raised in Milledgeville, Georgia, where her childhood revolved around the local Georgia College (now Georgia College and State University); her mother was the first tenured African American faculty member at the university. She and her sisters attended the Peabody School, a laboratory school run by the college’s College of Education, and helped desegregate it.⁠[1][1][1]

She has recalled that in seventh grade, at the Baldwin County social science fair, she researched the major causes of African American unemployment, a topic taken from the dissertation of Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander, the first African American to earn a PhD in economics; this was the beginning of her interest in economics.⁠[1][1][1][1]

Cook earned a BA in philosophy from Spelman College. In her junior year she won a Charles L. Merrill Scholarship to study in Strasbourg, France, and in her senior year she was selected as a Marshall Scholar, the first Spelman student to receive the scholarship; she then earned a second BA in philosophy, politics, and economics from the University of Oxford, choosing philosophy and politics as her two subjects.⁠[2][3][3][3][2][3]

She has recalled that later, while hiking on Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania, conversations with a British economist on the trek convinced her that economics had the tools to address the big questions that interested her, and she returned home to take the mathematics courses needed for a PhD in economics at Georgia College.⁠[1][1]

In 1991, Cook began her PhD in economics at the University of California, Berkeley, arriving just as the Soviet Union was starting to break up. Her dissertation adviser was Barry Eichengreen; to persuade Greg Grossman, an expert on the Soviet and Russian economies, to delay his retirement and advise her, she learned Russian in a year and a half. She worked through Tsarist-era statistical tables in Berkeley’s library and later traveled to Moscow to collect data and interview Russian bankers and entrepreneurs, researching banking in pre- and post-Soviet Russia, and earned her PhD with fields in macroeconomics and international economics.⁠[4][4][4][4][1][5]

From 2000 to 2001, Cook served as a senior adviser on finance and development in the U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of International Affairs.⁠[2]

Before joining Michigan State University, Cook was a National Fellow at Stanford University and then taught at Harvard UniversityHarvard UniversityHarvard University is a private research university in Massachusetts, established by the Massachusetts Bay Colony legislature in 1636 and named in 1639 for early benefactor John Harvard. Its principal campuses are in Cambridge and the Allston and Longwood neighborhoods of Boston. It includes Harvard College, graduate and professional schools, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Two governing boards share oversight. Alan M. Garber was president as of October 2026, and the endowment stood at $56.9 billion at the end of fiscal 2025.Open the full entry’s Kennedy School of Government, where she also served as deputy director for Africa Research at Harvard’s Center for International Development. In 2005 she joined Michigan State University as a professor of economics and international relations in the Department of Economics and James Madison College, and she was also a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research.⁠[2][2][6][6][2]

During the 2011–2012 academic year, Cook took leave from Michigan State University to serve as a senior economist on the White House Council of Economic Advisers under President Barack Obama, working on the eurozone, financial instruments, innovation, and entrepreneurship, and contributing to the chapters on the euro area crisis and the small-business recovery in the February 2012 Economic Report of the President.⁠[5][2][6][5]

In June 2014, Cook published “Violence and Economic Growth: Evidence from African American Patents, 1870-1940” in the Journal of Economic Growth, using the rise in mass violence between 1870 and 1940 as a historical experiment to examine the effect of ethnic and political violence on economic activity such as patenting. It is among her best-known research, focusing on the impact of lynching and racial violence on African American innovation.⁠[5][5][7]

From 2015 to 2016, Cook was president of the National Economic Association, and from 2018 to 2021 she directed the American Economic Association Summer Training Program, which creates opportunities for students from underrepresented backgrounds to advance in economics. In 2019 she was elected to the Executive Committee of the American Economic Association, becoming the fourth Black economist to serve on the association’s board in its 130-year history, and that year she also received the AEA Mentoring Pipeline Program’s Impactful Mentor Award for mentoring graduate students.⁠[5][2][6][5][6]

After the 2020 U.S. election, Cook was selected for the transition team of President-elect Joe Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris, serving as deputy team lead of the Federal Reserve, Banking, and Securities Regulators Agency Review Team and reviewing agencies such as the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., the Federal Reserve, the National Credit Union Administration, and the Securities and Exchange Commission. She was later elected to the board of directors of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago for a three-year term running through December 31, 2024; she had previously served on the board of directors of the Federal Home Loan Bank of Indianapolis.⁠[5][6][6][6][6]

On January 14, 2022, President Biden nominated Cook to serve as a governor of the Federal Reserve Board, alongside Philip Jefferson, while also nominating Sarah Bloom Raskin as vice chair for supervision.⁠[8][8]

Cook’s research covers economic growth and development, innovation, financial institutions and markets, and economic history, and has appeared in journals such as the American Economic Review and the Journal of Economic Growth; she served on the Board of Editors of the Journal of Economic Literature. She has long used historical and contemporary patent data to study innovation, building a data set of African American and women inventors and their patents, and has also studied financial reform in Russia and other emerging markets, Nigerian bank reform and poverty alleviation, and the effects of the Great Recession on Michigan households.⁠[5][5][5][5][5][5][5]

She speaks English, French, Russian, Spanish, and Wolof. At the Fed, she has served as chair of the Board’s Committee on Financial Stability.⁠[5][3]

Personal website: https://lisadcook.net/ (opens in a new window)⁠[5]

X: Public account: https://x.com/drlisadcook (opens in a new window)⁠[5]