Dr. Ben S. Bernanke is a distinguished senior fellow with the Economic Studies program at the Brookings Institution. From February 2006 through January 2014, he was chairman of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, having been appointed to that position by both Presidents Bush and Obama. In 2022, Dr. Bernanke was awarded the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel for his research on banks and financial crises.
Before his appointment as chairman, Dr. Bernanke was chairman of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers, from June 2005 to January 2006. He was a member of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System from 2002 to 2005.
From 1994 to 1996, Dr. Bernanke was the Class of 1926 Professor of Economics and Public Affairs at Princeton University. He was the Howard Harrison and Gabrielle Snyder Beck Professor of Economics and Public Affairs and chair of the Economics Department at the university from 1996 to 2002. Dr. Bernanke had been a professor of economics and public affairs at Princeton since 1985.
Before arriving at Princeton, Dr. Bernanke was an associate professor of economics (1983-85) and an assistant professor of economics (1979-83) at the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University. His teaching career also included serving as a visiting professor of economics at New York University and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Dr. Bernanke has published many articles on a wide variety of economic issues, including monetary policy, macroeconomics, and economic history, and he is the author of several scholarly books and two textbooks. He has held a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Sloan Fellowship, and he is a fellow of the Econometric Society and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Dr. Bernanke served as the director of the Monetary Economics Program of the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) and as a member of the NBER’s Business Cycle Dating Committee. In July 2001, he was appointed editor of the American Economic Review, the profession’s leading research journal. Dr. Bernanke’s work with civic and professional groups includes having served two terms as a member of the Montgomery Township (N.J.) Board of Education. He is currently serving as a member of the New Jersey Governor’s commission on the re-opening of that state.
Since leaving the Federal Reserve, Dr. Bernanke has continued to author articles and books, including his New York Times best-selling book, “The Courage to Act: A Memoir of a Crisis and its Aftermath,” (October 2015). In 2019 he served as president of the American Economic Association. He is a senior adviser to the asset management companies PIMCO.
Dr. Bernanke was born in December 1953 in Augusta, Georgia, and grew up in Dillon, South Carolina. He received a Bachelor of Arts degree in economics in 1975 from Harvard University (summa cum laude) and a Doctor of Philosophy degree in economics in 1979 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.