Dr. Lawrence H. Summers 

Lawrence H. Summers is President Emeritus of Harvard University, former Nathaniel Ropes Professor of Political Economy, and in the past decade served in a series of senior public policy positions, including Secretary of the Treasury of the United States, from 1999 to 2000.

Having received a bachelor of science degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1975, Mr. Summers began his Harvard career as a doctoral student in economics. He served, among other roles, as a resident tutor in Lowell House and a teaching fellow for Ec 10, the popular undergraduate economics survey course. After completing his dissertation, “An Asset-Price Approach to Capital Income Taxation,” he was awarded the Ph.D. from Harvard in 1982. By that time, he had taught for three years as an economics faculty member at MIT, where he was named assistant professor in 1979 and associate professor in 1982. He then went to Washington as a domestic policy economist for the President’s Council of Economic Advisers.

In 1983, he returned to Harvard as a professor of economics, one of the youngest individuals in recent history to be named as a tenured member of the University’s faculty. In 1987, he was named Nathaniel Ropes Professor of Political Economy. While on the faculty, he taught undergraduate and graduate courses in macroeconomics and public finance and was an adviser to numerous graduate students who have themselves gone on to become leading economists. He also served as an editor of the Quarterly Journal of Economics.

Mr. Summers in 1987 became the first social scientist ever to receive the annual Alan T. Waterman Award of the National Science Foundation (NSF), established by Congress to honor an exceptional young U.S. scientist or engineer whose work demonstrates originality, innovation, and a significant impact within one’s field. In 1993, Mr. Summers was awarded the John Bates Clark Medal, given every two years to the outstanding American economist under the age of 40.

Mr. Summers took leave from Harvard in 1991 to return to Washington, this time as vice president of development economics and chief economist of the World Bank. In that position, he played a key role in designing strategies to assist developing countries, served on the bank’s loan committee, and guided the bank’s research, statistics, and external training programs. His research featured an influential report demonstrating the very high return on investing in educating girls in developing countries.

In 1993, Mr. Summers was named as the nation’s Undersecretary of the Treasury for International Affairs. He had broad responsibility for assisting then Secretary Lloyd M. Bentsen in formulating and executing international economic policies. In 1995, then Secretary Robert E. Rubin AB '60 promoted Mr. Summers to the department’s number-two post, Deputy Secretary of the Treasury, in which he played a central role in a broad array of economic, financial, and tax matters, both international and domestic. During this time, he worked closely with Secretary Rubin and Alan Greenspan LLD '99 (hon.), chairman of the Federal Reserve System, in crafting government policy responses to financial crises in major developing countries.

On July 2, 1999, the United States Senate confirmed Mr. Summers as Secretary of the Treasury. In that capacity, he served as the principal economic adviser to the President and as the chief financial officer of the U.S. government, presiding over a federal department comprising some two dozen distinct bureaus and offices, with a civilian workforce of nearly 150,000 employees.

As secretary, he helped engineer an historic pay down of U.S. debt, worked successfully to extend the life of the Social Security and Medicare trust funds, and led the effort to enact the most sweeping financial deregulation in 60 years. Internationally, he worked to reform the international financial architecture and the International Monetary Fund, to secure debt relief for the world’s poorest countries, and to combat international money laundering. At the end of his term as treasury secretary, Mr. Summers was awarded the Alexander Hamilton Medal, the treasury department’s highest honor.

After leaving the treasury department in January, Mr. Summers served as the Arthur Okun Distinguished Fellow in Economics, Globalization, and Governance at the Brookings Institution in Washington.

On July 1, 2001, Mr. Summers took office as the 27th president of Harvard University.

During his tenure as Harvard’s President, Mr. Summers focused on laying the foundations for the University into the 21st century. His ambitious plans encompassed significant growth in the faculties, the further internationalization of the Harvard experience, expanded efforts in and enhanced commitment to the sciences, laying the ground work for Harvard’s future development of an expanded campus in Allston, and improved efforts to attract the strongest students, regardless of financial circumstance, with the Harvard Financial Aid Initiative. These initiatives were sustained by five years of successful fundraising and strong endowment returns, providing the University with unprecedented resources.

Upon the conclusion of his tenure as Harvard’s President, Mr. Summers plans to take a year of sabbatical leave from the University before returning to campus in 2007 to accept a position as a University Professor, an endowed position established in 1935 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College for "individuals of distinction ... working on the frontiers of knowledge, and in such a way as to cross the conventional boundaries of the specialties."

Mr. Summers’s many publications include “Understanding Unemployment” (1990) and “Reform in Eastern Europe” (1991, coauthored with others), as well as more than 100 articles in professional economics journals. He also edited the series “Tax Policy and the Economy.” In 2000, Mr. Summers was invited to present the American Economic Association’s prestigious Ely Lecture, in which he addressed "International Financial Crises: Causes, Preventions, and Cures."

In 2002, Mr. Summers was elected to the National Academy of Sciences, a private organization of scientists and engineers dedicated to the furtherance of science and its use for the general welfare.

In 2006, Mr. Summers served as one of five Co-Chairs to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

Additionally, Mr. Summers is a member of the boards of the Brookings Institution, the Center on Global Development, the Institute for International Economics, the Global Fund for Children’s Vaccines, and the Partnership for Public Service. He holds membership in the Council on Foreign Relations, the Trilateral Commission, the Bretton Woods Committee, the Council on Competitiveness, and the UNCTAD Panel of Eminent Persons.

Born in New Haven, Connecticut, on November 30, 1954, Mr. Summers spent most of his childhood in Penn Valley, Pennsylvania, a suburb of Philadelphia, and was educated in the Lower Merion public schools. He and his wife Elisa New, a professor of English at Harvard, reside in Brookline with their six children.