Daron Acemoglu

Daron Acemoğlu is an Institute Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a member of the Washington Center for Equitable Growth’s Steering Committee. He is also an elected fellow of the National Academy of Sciences, American Philosophical Society, the British Academy of Sciences, the Turkish Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Econometric Society, the European Economic Association, and the Society of Labor Economists. He is also a member of the Group of Thirty, and international body of financiers and academics.

Acemoglu is the author of six books, including New York Times bestseller Why Nations Fail: Power, Prosperity, and Poverty (joint with James A. Robinson), Introduction to Modern Economic Growth, The Narrow Corridor: States, Societies, and the Fate of Liberty (with James A. Robinson), and Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity (with Simon Johnson). His academic work covers a wide range of areas, including political economy, economic development, economic growth, technological change, inequality, labor economics and economics of networks.

Acemoglu received the inaugural T. W. Shultz Prize from the University of Chicago in 2004, and the inaugural Sherwin Rosen Award for outstanding contribution to labor economics in 2004, Distinguished Science Award from the Turkish Sciences Association in 2006, the John von Neumann Award, Rajk College, Budapest in 2007, the Carnegie Fellowship in 2017, the Jean-Jacques Laffont Prize in 2018, the Global Economy Prize in 2019, and the CME Mathematical and Statistical Research Institute prize in 2021.

Acemoglu was awarded the John Bates Clark Medal in 2005, the Erwin Plein Nemmers Prize in 2012, and the 2016 BBVA Frontiers of Knowledge Award. He holds a B.A. in economics from the University of York, and an M.Sc. and Ph.D. from the London School of Economics. In addition, he holds Honorary Doctorates from the University of Utrecht, the Bosporus University, University of Athens, Bilkent University, the University of Bath, Ecole Normale Superieure, Saclay Paris, and the London Business School.

Catherine Wolfram

Catherine Wolfram, a member of the Washington Center for Equitable Growth’s Steering Committee, is the William F. Pounds Professor of Energy Economics and a professor of applied economics at the MIT Sloan School of Management. She previously served as the Cora Jane Flood Professor of Business Administration at the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley. From March 2021 to October 2022, she served as the deputy assistant secretary for climate and energy economics at the U.S. Department of the Treasury, while on leave from UC Berkeley. Before leaving for government service, she was the program director of the National Bureau of Economic Research’s Environment and Energy Economics Program and a research affiliate at the Energy Institute at Haas. Before joining the faculty at UC Berkeley, she was an assistant professor of economics at Harvard University.

Wolfram has published extensively on the economics of energy markets. Her work has analyzed rural electrification programs in the developing world, energy efficiency programs in the United States, the effects of environmental regulation on energy markets and the impact of privatization and restructuring in the United States and the United Kingdom. She is currently working on several projects at the intersection of climate and trade. She received a Ph.D. in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and an A.B. from Harvard University.

Byron Auguste

Byron Auguste is a member of the Washington Center for Equitable Growth’s Steering Committee and is the CEO and co-founder of Opportunity@Work, a nonprofit organization that seeks to expand access to career opportunities so that all Americans can work, learn, and earn to their full potential in a dynamic economy.

Prior to co-founding Opportunity@Work, Auguste served for 2 years in the White House as deputy assistant to President Barack Obama for economic policy and deputy director of the National Economic Council, where his policy portfolio included job creation and labor markets, skills and workforce policies, innovation, investment, infrastructure, transportation, and goods movement.

Until 2013, Auguste was a senior partner at McKinsey & Company in Washington, DC, and in Los Angeles, where he was elected principal in 1999 and director in 2005. He also served as a member of the boards of trustees of The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and Yale University. 

He is an elected member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Pacific Council on International Policy, and he serves on the boards of Hope Street Group and Opportunity@Work.

Auguste earned a B.A. summa cum laude in economics and political science from Yale University, where he was awarded a Truman Scholarship and the James Gordon Bennet Prize, and he holds an M.Phil. and D.Phil. in economics from Oxford University as a Marshall Scholar.

Karen Dynan

Karen Dynan, a member of the Washington Center for Equitable Growth’s Steering Committee, is a professor of the practice in the Department of Economics at Harvard University. She served as assistant secretary for economic policy and chief economist at the U.S. Department of the Treasury from 2014 to 2017, leading analysis of economic conditions and development of policies to address the nation’s economic challenges. From 2009 to 2013, Dynan was vice president and co-director of the Economic Studies program at the Brookings Institution. Before that, she was on the staff of the Federal Reserve Board for 17 years, playing a leadership role in a number of areas, including macroeconomic forecasting, household finances, and the Fed’s response to the financial crisis. Dynan also served as a senior economist at the White House Council of Economic Advisers from 2003 to 2004 and as a visiting assistant professor at Johns Hopkins University in 1998. Dynan teaches in the Harvard Economics Department and at the Harvard Kennedy School; she is also currently a nonresident senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. Dynan’s research focuses on fiscal and other types of macroeconomic policy, consumer behavior, and household finances. She received her Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University and her A.B. from Brown University.

Trevon Logan

Trevon Logan, a member of the Washington Center for Equitable Growth’s Steering Committee, is ENGIE-Axium Endowed Professor of Economics at The Ohio State University and a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. He is also the associate dean for administration, College of Arts and Sciences. He has held visiting appointments at Princeton University’s Center for Health and Well-Being and at the University of Michigan, where he was a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Scholar in Health Policy Research. He is also an affiliate of the Initiative in Population Research, the Center for Human Resource Research, the Food Innovation Center, and the Criminal Justice Research Center at Ohio State. He currently serves on the editorial boards of Explorations in Economic History, Historical Methods and Demographic Research. Logan specializes in economic history, economic demography, and applied microeconomics. He also does work that intersects with health economics, applied econometrics, applied microeconomics, and sociology. He received his bachelor’s degree in economics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and his master’s degree in demography, as well as a master’s degree and a Ph.D., in economics from University of California, Berkeley.

Suresh Naidu

Suresh Naidu, a member of the Washington Center for Equitable Growth’s Steering Committee, is the Jack Wang and Echo Ren Professor of Economics at Columbia University. Additionally, he is external faculty at the Santa Fe Institute, a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, and co-director of the Columbia Center on Political Economy. Naidu’s interests are in the economic effects of democracy and non-democracy, monopsony in labor markets, the economics of American slavery, guest worker migration, and labor unions and labor organizing. He holds a B.A. in pure math from the University of Waterloo, a master’s degree in economics from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and a Ph.D. in economics from the University of California, Berkeley.

Jason Furman

Jason Furman, a member of the Washington Center for Equitable Growth’s Steering Committee, is professor of the practice of economic policy at Harvard Kennedy School. He is also nonresident senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. This followed eight years as a top economic adviser to President Barack Obama, including serving as the 28th chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers from August 2013 to January 2017, acting as both President Obama’s chief economist and a member of the cabinet. During this time, Furman played a major role in most of the major economic policies of the Obama administration.

Previously, Furman held a variety of posts in public policy and research. In public policy, Furman worked at both the Council of Economic Advisers and National Economic Council during the Clinton administration and also at the World Bank. In research, Furman was a director of the Hamilton Project and senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, and also has served in visiting positions at various universities, including New York University’s Wagner Graduate School of Public Policy. Furman has conducted research in a wide range of areas, including fiscal policy, tax policy, health economics, Social Security, technology policy, and domestic and international macroeconomics. In addition to articles in scholarly journals and periodicals, Furman is the editor of two books on economic policy. Furman holds a Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University.

Heidi Williams

Heidi Williams, a member of the Washington Center for Equitable Growth’s Steering Committee, is a professor of economics at Dartmouth College. Additionally, she is the director of science policy at the Institute for Progress, co-chair of J-PAL’s Science for Progress Initiative, and co-director of the innovation policy working group at the National Bureau of Economic Research. Prior, she was the Charles R. Schwab professor of economics and a professor, by courtesy, at Stanford Law School. She is a fellow of the Econometric Society and a recipient of a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, and the ASHEcon Medal. Her research focuses on how society can best support science and innovation, and how we can best ensure that science and innovation generate broad benefits to society. Williams holds a B.A. in mathematics from Dartmouth College, a M.Sc. in development economics from Oxford University, and her Ph.D. in economics from Harvard.

Atif Mian

Atif Mian is a member of the Washington Center for Equitable Growth’s Steering Committee, the John H. Laporte, Jr. Class of 1967 professor of economics, public policy, and finance at Princeton University, and director of the Julis-Rabinowitz Center for Public Policy and Finance at the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs. Prior to joining Princeton in 2012, he taught at the University of California, Berkeley and the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. His current work focuses on the deeper implications of rising inequality for the macroeconomy—including growth, financial markets, monetary policy and fiscal policy. His 2014 book, House of Debt, with Amir Sufi builds upon powerful new data to describe how debt precipitated the Great Recession. The book explains why debt continues to threaten the global economy and what needs to be done to fix the financial system. House of Debt is critically acclaimed by the New York Times, Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Economist, and The Atlantic, among others. Mian’s research has appeared in top academic journals, including the American Economic Review, Econometrica, Quarterly Journal of Economics, Journal of Finance, Review of Financial Studies, and Journal of Financial Economics. Mian holds a bachelor’s degree in mathematics with computer science and a Ph.D. in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Alan Blinder

Alan S. Blinder is the Gordon S. Rentschler Memorial Professor of Economics and Public Affairs at Princeton University, where he has been a faculty member since 1971. He is also a regular columnist for the Wall Street Journal and a member of the Washington Center for Equitable Growth’s Steering Committee. In addition to his time in academia, Blinder previously served as a member of President Bill Clinton’s original Council of Economic Advisers, and then as vice chairman of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System. He is the author or co-author of 23 books, including the textbook Economics: Principles and Policy, now in its 14th edition (with William Baumol and John Solow), from which more than 3 million college students have learned introductory economics. Blinder’s best-selling book, After the Music Stopped: The Financial Crisis, the Response, and the Work Ahead, has also won several awards, and in 2011, he was elected a distinguished fellow of the American Economic Association. Blinder earned his A.B. at Princeton University, his M.Sc. at the London School of Economics, and his Ph.D. at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology—all in economics.