Research Division a Global Research Engine

I executive-manage a division of 100+ highly specialized professionals, anchoring a core, elite strategy group of roughly 25 Ph.D. economists, together with our Research Fellows and Research Associates. We have intentionally designed this core team to be exceptionally lean and agile—structured specifically to operate as a high-impact crisis unit that can pivot instantly to analyze sudden global economic shocks with absolute precision. Under my leadership, this streamlined engine has consistently driven the St. Louis Fed Research Division into the top 1% of all economics research departments globally (IDEAS/RePEc), placing our institutional output ahead of much larger, traditional academic faculties worldwide.

I have structured our division to operate as a high-velocity generator of real-time economic knowledge, with a deliberate focus on making complex insights accessible to all stakeholders across the population:

• Frontier Macroeconomic Research: We drive global economic discourse by producing original, high-impact quantitative research across macroeconomics, monetary theory, and financial markets. We place equal emphasis on the rigor of our structural models and our ability to translate those insights into clear, comprehensible, and actionable frameworks for the public.

• Rapid-Response Policy Analysis: I have positioned our research pipeline to demystify fast-moving economic trends in real time. Our widely cited policy briefs and institutional publications are engineered to communicate seamlessly across the entire economic spectrum—delivering clear, data-driven frameworks that serve central bank governors and international journalists as effectively as they inform students and everyday market participants.

• Regional Intelligence & The Beige Book: I oversee our Regional Economics teams, who synthesize boots-on-the-ground intelligence across the Eighth Federal Reserve District to produce the St. Louis contributions to the Beige Book, alongside real-time data dashboards tracking state, county, and metro economic health.

Global Digital Infrastructure & Public Goods 

Beyond academic research, my mandate includes the executive oversight of the world's most heavily utilized public economic data ecosystems and educational architectures. I direct the modernization and global scaling of a massive digital footprint:

• FRED® (Federal Reserve Economic Data): The premier global standard for financial and economic data. We maintain, update daily, and scale an infrastructure providing 24/7 access to more than 820,000+ data series ingested from over 100 international public and proprietary sources.

• FRASER® & The Homer Jones Library: We preserve the nation's economic memory, managing a unique digital library holding over half a million historical policy and financial documents, alongside Fed in Print—the central online catalog for the entire Federal Reserve System.

• Federal Reserve History: A gateway to history for educators, students, and the general public. It makes the vast amount of material about the Fed more findable and easier to understand.

• Fed in print:, the central online catalog of Fed publications. Librarians in our Homer Jones Memorial Research Library maintain Fed in Print.

• FRE.org (Federal Reserve Education) System-Wide Educational Scaling: I led the full technological and structural rebranding of our educational outreach, scaling our award-winning EconLowdown® portal into the modern, cloud-driven FRE.org infrastructure. This free platform delivers institutional-grade financial and economic curriculum materials to millions of K-12 and college classrooms, with a deliberate focus on empowering historically underserved student populations.  

• Native Economic and Financial Education Empowerment (NEFEE): This program supports the financial and economic well-being of tribal nations and Native communities across the United States by strengthening access to economic and personal finance education.

Building the Economics Pipeline & Future Leadership

A core pillar of my leadership strategy is actively confronting the systemic lack of diversity and representation within the economics profession. I have transformed our recruitment and outreach architecture to build a highly visible, robust pipeline of future leaders from high school to graduate school:

• Inclusive Talent Acquisition: We aggressively recruit top-tier Ph.D. economists, intentionally cultivating an environment that leverages diverse backgrounds and cognitive perspectives to spark innovative macroeconomic modeling.

• Early-Career Mentorship: For over a decade, we have pioneered early-intervention career pathways. Through our Student Board of Directors program (established in 2012), our Research Associate internship programs, and our specialized symposia and podcast series (launched in 2018), we provide direct mentorship from practicing central bank economists, structurally lowering the barriers to entry for the next generation of economic leaders.