Economist Susan Collins named Boston Fed president

University of Michigan provost and economics professor Susan Collins was announced Wednesday as the next president and CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston.

Collins, an economist who studied at Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, will become the first woman of color to lead one of the Fed’s 12 regional reserve banks. She will also serve on the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC), the panel responsible for setting the Fed’s baseline interest rate range and other monetary policy tools.

“It is an honor and an inspiration to serve as the Boston Fed’s next president,” Collins said in a Wednesday statement.

“Throughout my career, I have been driven by a commitment to leveraging research, education, and public service to improve lives. I look forward to helping the Bank and System pursue the Fed’s dual mandate from Congress – achieving price stability and maximum employment,” she added.

Collins has focused primarily on international economics throughout her academic career and spent two decades in Washington, D.C, working in a range of policy roles. She was a senior staff economist for the White House Council of Economic Advisers from 1989 to 1990, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution from 1992 to 2007 and a visiting scholar at the International Monetary Fund in 2001.

Collins held most of those roles while also serving as an economics professor at Georgetown University, where she taught from 1992 until she joined the University of Michigan in 2007.

Collins will take over the Boston Fed on July 1 and will be eligible to vote on Fed monetary policy decisions in 2022. The FOMC consists of the entire Fed board of governors, the president of the Federal Reserve of New York and a yearly rotation of four presidents from the other 11 regional reserve banks.

The Fed is preparing to hike interest rates several times this year to curb a burst of inflation driven by a rapid recovery from the coronavirus recession. While the unemployment rate has fallen close to pre-pandemic levels, consumer prices rose 7 percent in 2021 as the pace of the recovery overwhelmed stores, producers and shippers still constrained by COVID-19.

She will also oversee the Boston Fed’s development of the FedNow payments system along with the Fed system’s operations throughout New England.

Collins will succeed former Boston Fed President Eric Rosengren, who announced his retirement last year. While Rosengren attributed his retirement to health issues, he was one of several Fed officials to come under fire for heavy financial trading activity as the bank was scrambling to protect the economy from the coronavirus pandemic.