Cook, Lisa

Lisa DeNell Cook is 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. 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. From November 2008 to January 2009, she was on the Obama Presidential Transition Team and led the review of the World Bank and International Affairs division of the Treasury Department. Dr. Cook served as a Senior Economist in the Obama Administration's Council of Economic Advisers from August 2011 to August 2012. Dr. Lisa D. Cook earned a B.A. from Spellman College and then as a Marshall Scholar, she received a second B.A. from Oxford University in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics. Dr. Cook earned a Ph.D. in economics from the University of California, Berkeley.