Lawrence H. Summers

Biography

Lawrence H. Summers is the Charles W. Eliot University Professor and President Emeritus of Harvard University. Over the past two decades, he has served in a series of senior policy positions in Washington D.C., including as the 71st Secretary of the Treasury for President Clinton, Director of the National Economic Council for President Obama and Vice President of Development Economics and Chief Economist at the World Bank.

He received a BSc degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1975 and received a PhD from Harvard University in 1982. In 1983 he became one of the youngest individuals in recent history to be named as a tenured member of the Harvard University faculty. In 1987 Lawrence H. Summers became the first social scientist ever to receive the annual Alan T. Waterman Award of the National Science Foundation. In 1993 he was awarded the John Bates Clark Medal, which is awarded every two years to an outstanding American economist under the age of 40.

He is currently the Charles W. Eliot University Professor at Harvard University and the Weil Director of the Mossa¬var-Rahmani Center for Business and Government at the Harvard Kennedy School. He and his wife, Elisa New, a Professor of English at Harvard, reside in Brookline with their six children.