Archives: Team Members

ROBERT E. RUBIN served as the 70th United States Treasury Secretary from 1995 to 1999, after serving as the first director of the White House National Economic Council. In these roles, he helped achieve the first federal budget surplus in a generation, address international financial crises, and resolve a debt-ceiling standoff, among much else. Rubin is the author of In an Uncertain World: Tough Choices from Wall Street to Washington, a New York Timesbestseller, and The Yellow Pad: Making Better Decisions in an Uncertain World. He spent twenty-six years at Goldman Sachs, rising to co-senior partner, and was a senior counselor and board member at Citigroup. He currently serves as counselor to the independent investment advisory firm Centerview Partners, as co-chairman emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations, and as chair of the Local Initiatives Support Corporation. Rubin is a founder of The Hamilton Project at the Brookings Institution, which promotes broad-based economic growth. A former member of the Harvard Corporation, he graduated from Harvard summa cum laude and from Yale Law School.

PENNY PRITZKER is the founder and Chairman of PSP Partners and its affiliates, Pritzker Realty Group, PSP Capital, and PSP Growth. From June 2013 through January 2017, she served as U.S. Secretary of Commerce in the Obama Administration. Ms. Pritzker is an entrepreneur, civic leader, and philanthropist, with more than 30 years of experience in numerous industries. In addition to her work at PSP Partners, Ms. Pritzker launched a number of other businesses over the course of her career, which included founding Vi Senior Living (formerly known as Classic Residence by Hyatt), and co-founding The Parking Spot, Artemis Real Estate Partners, and Inspired Capital Partners. Ms. Pritzker is a member of the boards of Microsoft Corporation, DEPT and Icertis.

Ms. Pritzker serves as President Biden’s Special Representative for Ukraine’s Economic Recovery.  In July of 2022, Ms. Pritzker was elected as the Senior Fellow (chair) of the Harvard Corporation and is the first woman to hold the position. In addition to those roles, Ms. Pritzker is a member of the Aspen Strategy Group and Aspen Economic Strategy Group, member of the Obama Foundation Board and co-chair of the Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum Advisory Council.

Ms. Pritzker previously served as chairman of the board of trustees of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, cofounder and board chair of Chicago-based civic-tech organization P33. She also was formerly a member of the board of the Council on Foreign Relations, the board of trustees of Stanford University, the Harvard University Board of Overseers and founded Skills for America’s Future.

Ms. Pritzker earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in Economics from Harvard University and a Juris Doctor and Masters of Business Administration from Stanford University. Ms. Pritzker and her husband, Dr. Bryan Traubert, co-founded the Pritzker Traubert Foundation, a private philanthropic foundation that works to foster increased economic opportunity for Chicago’s families.

JAMES POTERBA is the Mitsui Professor of Economics at the MassachusettsInstitute of Technology and the president and CEO of the National Bureau of Economic Research, a nonprofit research organization with more than 1800 affiliated economists. His recent research has analyzed the accumulation and draw-down of retirement saving and the economic effects of population aging.  He has served as president of the National Tax Association, vice president of the American Economic Association, and is a member of the National Academy of Sciences. He is a trustee of the College Retirement Equity Fund.  He holds an undergraduate degree from Harvard College and a D. Phil. in economics from Oxford University, where he was a Marshall scholar.

MELISSA S. KEARNEY is the Neil Moskowitz Professor of Economics at the University of Maryland. She is also director of the Aspen Economic Strategy Group; a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research; and a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. She currently serves on the Board of Directors of MDRC and on the Board of the Notre Dame Wilson-Sheehan Lab for Economic Opportunities. Kearney previously served as Director of the Hamilton Project at Brookings and as co-chair of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology J-PAL State and Local Innovation Initiative. Kearney’s research focuses on poverty, inequality, and social policy in the United States. Her work is published in leading academic journals and is frequently cited in the press. She is an editorial board member of the American Economic Journal: Economic Policy and the Journal of Economic Literature; she was previously co-editor of the Journal of Human Resources and a Senior Editor of the Future of Children. She is the author of The Two-Parent Privilege (University of Chicago Press, 2023.) Kearney teaches Public Economics at both the undergraduate and Ph.D. level at the University of Maryland. She holds a B.A. in Economics from Princeton University and a Ph.D. in Economics from MIT.

N. GREGORY MANKIW is the Robert M. Beren Professor of Economics at Harvard University. As a student, he studied economics at Princeton University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. As a teacher, he has taught macroeconomics, microeconomics, statistics, and principles of economics. He even spent one summer long ago as a sailing instructor on Long Beach Island. Mankiw is a prolific writer and a regular participant in academic and policy debates. His research includes work on price adjustment, consumer behavior, financial markets, monetary and fiscal policy, and economic growth. He has written two popular textbooks—the intermediate-level textbook Macroeconomics (Worth Publishers) and the introductory textbook Principles of Economics (Cengage Learning). Principles of Economics has sold over two million copies and has been translated into 20 languages. In addition to his teaching, research, and writing, Mankiw has been a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, an adviser to the Congressional Budget Office and the Federal Reserve Banks of Boston and New York, and a member of the ETS test development committee for the advanced placement exam in economics. From 2003 to 2005 he served as chairman of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers.

MAYA MACGUINEAS is the president of the bipartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. Her areas of expertise include budget, tax, and economic policy. As a leading budget expert for the past twenty years and a political independent, she has worked closely with members of both parties and serves as a trusted resource on Capitol Hill. MacGuineas testifies regularly before Congress and has published broadly, including regularly in The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Financial Times, The Atlantic, and numerous other outlets. She also appears regularly as a commentator on television. MacGuineas oversees a number of the Committee’s projects including the grassroots coalition Fix the Debt; the Committee’s Fiscal Institute; and FixUS, a project seeking to better understand the root causes of our nation’s growing divisions and deteriorating political system, and to work with others to bring attention to these issues and the need to fix them. Her most recent area of focus is on the future of the economy, technology, and capitalism. Previously, MacGuineas worked at the Brookings Institution and on Wall Street, and in the spring of 2009, she did a stint on The Washington Post editorial board, covering economic and fiscal policy. MacGuineas serves on a number of boards and is a native Washingtonian.

NEEL KASHKARI has been president and CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis since Jan. 1, 2016. He serves as a member on the Federal Open Market Committee, bringing the Ninth Federal Reserve District’s perspective to monetary policy discussions in Washington, D.C. In addition, Neel oversees Minneapolis Fed operations and leads its many initiatives. He was instrumental in establishing the Opportunity & Inclusive Growth Institute, whose mission is to ensure that world-class research helps to improve the economic well-being of all Americans. Most recently, he’s supported the expansion of the Center for Indian Country Development, which advances the prosperity of Native nations and Indigenous communities through actionable data and research. Neel earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in mechanical engineering from the University of Illinois. He became an aerospace engineer, developing technology for NASA missions. Eventually turning to finance and public policy, he earned his MBA from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, joined Goldman Sachs, and served in several senior positions at the U.S. Department of the Treasury, including overseeing the Troubled Assets Relief Program, or TARP, during the financial crisis. Before joining the Minneapolis Fed, he spent four years at PIMCO and then, in 2014, ran for governor of California on a platform focused on economic opportunity. He lives with his wife, Christine; children, Uly and Tecumseh; and Newfoundland dog, Webster, in Orono, Minnesota.

NEIL IRWIN is chief economic correspondent at Axios and lead author of Axios Macro, a daily e-mail newsletter focused on the economy and economic policy. He was previously senior economic correspondent at The New York Times, where he wrote commentary and analysis on the economy. He is the author of The Alchemists: Three Central Bankers and a World on Fire, about the global financial crisis and its aftermath, a New York Times bestseller that was shortlisted for the Financial Times Business Book of the Year Award. He often analyzes economic trends on television and radio, including appearances on the PBS Newshour, CBS This Morning, BBC America, MSNBC, CNBC, CNN, and public radio’s Marketplace. Irwin has an M.B.A. from Columbia University, where he was a Knight-Bagehot fellow in economic and business journalism.