Rachel Lipson

Rachel Lipson is a research fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government and resident scholar at the Aspen Institute Economic Strategy Group. Her current research focuses on a new generation of technical jobs—many fueled by AI and other emerging technologies—that do not require a four-year degree. She is studying the labor market experience of U.S. “frontier regions” at the forefront of producing critical technologies such as data centers, chips, quantum, nuclear energy, aerospace, biomanufacturing, and batteries. 
 
From 2023 to 2025, Rachel served as a senior policy advisor at the U.S. Department of Commerce’s CHIPS Program Office, where she helped launch the workforce strategy for the $50 billion federal investment to revitalize domestic semiconductor manufacturing. Prior to joining the federal government, Rachel served as the inaugural director of the Project on Workforce at Harvard, a cross-university initiative focused on creating better pathways between education and the labor market.  
 
Rachel is the co-editor of “America’s Hidden Economic Engines” (Harvard Education Press, 2023), a well-regarded volume that has helped catalyze community college reform efforts nationwide. Her writing has appeared in The Boston Globe, The Washington Post, Newsweek, and The Hill, and her research has been featured by C-SPAN, NPR, Bloomberg, The Economist, and MIT Technology Review. She previously co-led the Workforce Futures Initiative in partnership with the Brookings Institution and the American Enterprise Institute and served on a National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine task force on the STEM workforce. She has also held economic policy roles across the public, private, and nonprofit sectors, including at the World Bank, JPMorgan Chase, Obama for America, Year Up, and Mexico’s Ministry of Communications. She is currently an expert advisor to Goodman Philanthropies, a new philanthropy dedicated to improving economic mobility in the United States. 
 
Rachel graduated magna cum laude in government from Harvard College and holds an MBA and MPP from Harvard Business School and Harvard Kennedy School. She is a recipient of the Frederick Fischer Prize for outstanding research on social policy, the Harvard Certificate of Distinction and Excellence in Teaching, a Harvard Business School Leadership Fellowship, and the Thomas T. Hoopes Prize for outstanding scholarly work. In 2024-25, she was a Futures Fellow at Stanford University’s Center on Longevity as part of a year-long cohort of leaders developing a vision for human capital development that supports longer lives and multiple career transitions. Rachel started her career in public service as the student representative to the Clarkstown Central School District Board of Education.