Lisa D. Cook

Lisa DeNell Cook is an American economist working as a professor of economics and international relations at Michigan State University and a member of the American Economic Association's Executive Committee. An authority on international economics, especially on the Russian economy, she has been involved in advising policymakers from the Obama Administration to the Nigerian and Rwandan governments. Her research is at the intersection of macroeconomics and economic history, with recent work in African-American history and innovation economics. As one of the Economics profession's few prominent black women, she has attracted attention within the economics profession for her efforts in mentoring black women and advocating for their inclusion in the field of economics.
Early life and education.
Cook is one of three daughters of Baptist hospital chaplain Payton B. Cook and Georgia College professor of nursing Mary Murray Cook, and was raised in Milledgeville, Georgia. As a child, she was involved in desegregating schools in Georgia, and still has physical scars from attacks on Black children who enrolled in formerly White schools. She is a cousin of chemist Percy Julian.
She read for a BA in Physics and Philosophy (magna cum laude) from Spelman College in 1986, where she was named a Harry S. Truman Scholar. She proceeded to St Hilda's College, Oxford as Spelman's first Marshall Scholar where she earned another BA in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics in 1988. She took courses towards a Master's Degree in Philosophy at Cheikh Anta Diop University in Senegal. After a mountain climbing trip on Mount Kilimanjaro with an economist, Cook began to seriously consider pursuing a PhD in Economics. A car accident left her using a wheelchair when she entered graduate school. Cook earned a PhD in Economics from the University of California, Berkeley in 1997 under the guidance of Barry Eichengreen and David Romer. Her dissertation focused on the underdevelopment of the banking system in czarist and post-Soviet Russia.
Career.
Cook was a member of the faculty at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University and Harvard Business School from 1997 to 2002, spending a year as a senior adviser on finance and development at the U.S. Treasury Department as a Council on Foreign Relations International Affairs Fellow from 2000 to 2001. She was a National Fellow and Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University from 2002 to 2005. Cook advised the Nigerian government on its banking reforms in 2005, and the government of Rwanda on economic development. In 2005, Cook joined Michigan State University as an assistant professor, becoming a tenured associate professor in 2013. She served as a Senior Economist in the Obama Administration's Council of Economic Advisers from August 2011 to August 2012.
Early in her career, Cook's research focused on international economics, particularly the Russian economy. Later she has broadened her research on economic growth to focus on the economic history of African-Americans. Her research suggested that violence against African-Americans under the Jim Crow laws led to a lower than expected number of actual patents filed. Together with other economists, she has collated a long-running database on lynching in the United States.
Since 2016, she has directed the American Economic Association's Summer Program for underrepresented minority students. She became a member of the American Economic Association's Executive Committee in 2019. Her best known mentee is Anna Gifty Opoku-Agyeman, with whom she has written opinion pieces and participated in interviews advocating especially for the inclusion and advancement of black women in the economics profession.
In November 2020, Cook was named a volunteer member of the Joe Biden presidential transition Agency Review Team to support transition efforts related to the Federal Reserve.