Cecilia Elena Rouse

Cecilia Elena Rouse is the president of the Brookings Institution. From 2021 to 2023, she served as Chair of the Council of Economic Advisers (CEA), the first Black American to fill that role in the CEA’s 75-year history. Confirmed with 95 votes in the U.S. Senate, she served as CEA Chair while on public service leave from Princeton University, where she joined the faculty in 1992. While at Princeton, she also served as dean of the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs from 2012 to 2021. She is the University’s Katzman-Ernst Professor in Economics and Education and a professor of economics and public affairs.

A labor economist with a focus on the economics of education, Rouse is the founding director of the Princeton Education Research Section and a member of the American Philosophical Society, the National Academy of Education, and the National Academy of Sciences. She served as senior editor of The Future of Children, a policy journal published by Princeton and the Brookings Institution, co-editor of the Journal of Labor Economics, and on the editorial boards of the American Economic Journal: Economic Policy and other journals. She previously served on the boards of the Council of Foreign Relations, MDRC, the National Bureau of Economic Research, and the University of Rhode Island, and was an independent director of the T. Rowe Price Funds.

Rouse’s time as CEA chair was her third White House tour of duty. She served as a member of the Council of Economic Advisers from 2009 to 2011, and as Special Assistant to the President at the National Economic Council from 1998 to 1999.

Rouse earned both her doctoral degree in economics and her bachelor’s degree from Harvard University.