Elizabeth Oltmans Ananat is the Mallya Professor of Women and Economics at Barnard College, Columbia University. She is the co-leader for Policies and Inequalities of the Columbia University Population Research Center and a member of the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine’s Standing Committee on Reproductive Health, Equity, and Society. Her research focuses on the causes and consequences of the intergenerational transmission of poverty and inequality and has examined the effects of social programs, tax policy, labor market regulation, access to reproductive choice, and macroeconomic conditions. Ananat has received numerous awards for her scholarship, including the Andrew Carnegie Fellowship, the Russell Sage Foundation Fellowship, the William T. Grant Foundation Fellowship, and the Rosabeth Moss Kanter Award for Work-Family Research. In 2010, she served as senior economist for Labor, Education, and Welfare at the White House Council of Economic Advisers.

Ananat graduated from Williams College summa cum laude in mathematics and political economy, received her Master of Public Policy from the Ford School at the University of Michigan, and earned a Ph.D. in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.