MNI: Boston Fed Names Susan Collins as Rosengren's Successor

The Boston Federal Reserve on Wednesday named Susan Collins as its president and the newest U.S. monetary policymaker, making her the first black woman to oversee a regional Fed bank.

Collins will be an FOMC voter in 2022 after taking office July 1, following the completion of the academic year at the University of Michigan where she is currently provost and executive vice president for academic affairs. Collins succeeds Eric Rosengren, who left the position in September last year citing a kidney ailment after being at the regional central bank branch for 14 years.

Collins has a Ph.D. in economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, after graduating from Harvard University. Collins' published research has focused on the determinants of economic growth, exchange rate regimes and economic performance, the implications of global integration for U.S. labor markets, persistent macroeconomic imbalances, and countries’ economic transformations.

Collins has served multiple times as a moderator at the Jackson Hole symposium hosted by the Kansas City Federal Reserve Bank. From 2006 to 2009, she served as an elected member of the American Economic Association’s executive committee and earlier she had been a member and then chair of the American Economic Association’s Committee on the Status of Minority Groups in the Economics Profession, according to a statement from the Boston Fed.

She also served for nine years on the Board of Directors of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago

Kenneth Montgomery, who assumed the interim president role, will remain the Bank’s interim president until July and will continue as first vice president and chief operating officer.