Gita Gopinath

Gopinath was appointed as Chief Economist of the International Monetary Fund in October 2018. In an interview with Trevor Noah on The Daily Show, she named the worldwide recession of 2020 as "The Great Lockdown."

In October 2018, Gita Gopinath was appointed chief economist of the International Monetary Fund. Gita Gopinath is the John Zwaanstra Professor of International Studies and of Economics at Harvard University. She is co-director of the International Finance and Macroeconomics program at the National Bureau of Economic Research, a visiting scholar at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, a member of the economic advisory panel of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Economic Adviser to the Chief Minister of Kerala state (India), a co-editor at the American Economic Review, and a co-editor of the 2019 edition of the Handbook of International Economics.

In October 2018, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) Managing Director Christine Lagarde appointed Gita Gopinath as Economic Counsellor and Director of the IMF's Research Department. In 2018, she was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Econometric Society. Foreign Policy named her one of the Top Global Thinkers in 2019. In 2017, she received the Distinguished Alumnus Award from the University of Washington. She was named one of the top 25 economists under 45 by the International Monetary Fund in 2014 and was chosen as a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum in 2011. In 2019 she has been awarded Pravasi Bharatiya Samman, the highest honor for a person of Indian origin, by the President of India.

Gopinath's husband, Iqbal Singh Dhaliwal, is the Global Executive Director at Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab at the Department of Economics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He began his career in public service as a member of the Indian Administrative Service (IAS), which he left later. He was the first rank holder of UPSC civil service 1995. His first posting was as Sub-collector in Tirunelveli District. They have a son named Rohil.

Gopinath studied at Nirmala Convent School in Mysore. She received a B.A. degree from Lady Shri Ram College for Women of the University of Delhi in 1992 and an M.A. degree in economics from Delhi School of Economics, also of the University of Delhi, in 1994. She further completed an M.A. degree at the University of Washington in 1996. She earned her Ph.D. in economics from Princeton University in 2001 after completing a doctoral dissertation titled "Three essays on international capital flows: a search theoretic approach," under the supervision of Ben Bernanke and Kenneth Rogoff. She was awarded the Princeton's Woodrow Wilson Fellowship Research Award while doing her doctoral research at Princeton.

Gita Gopinath (born 8 December 1971) is an Indian American economist who has been the Chief Economist of the International Monetary Fund since 2019. In that role she is the Director of IMF's Research Department and the Economic Counsellor of the Fund.

Gopinath was born on 8 December 1971 in Kannur, India. She is the younger of two daughters of T.V. Gopinath and V.C. Vijayalakshmi, both of whom hail from Kannur, Kerala. Her father, T.V. Gopinath, is related to the late A. K. Gopalan.