Gita Gopinath

Gita Gopinath is an Indian-American economist, born on 8 December 1971, who served as chief economist of the International Monetary Fund from 2019 to 2022 — the first woman to hold the post — and then as the Fund's first deputy managing director from January 2022 to August 2025. She has since returned to Harvard University as a professor of economics, where she was previously the John Zwaanstra Professor of International Studies and Economics; earlier she taught at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. She is co-director of the international finance and macroeconomics programme at the National Bureau of Economic Research. ^{1 2}

Gopinath is included here as a named contemporary of this group's subjects in the queue of modern figures: a leading economist of the same generation whose IMF tenure overlapped the world of the other economists in this wave. ¹

Gopinath was born on 8 December 1971 in Kolkata, India, into a Malayali family from Kannur, Kerala; she is the younger of two daughters of T. V. Gopinath and V. C. Vijayalakshmi, and her family is related to the late A. K. Gopalan. She studied at Nirmala Convent School in Mysore. She took a BA from Lady Shri Ram College for Women of the University of Delhi in 1992 and an MA in economics from the Delhi School of Economics in 1994, then a further MA at the University of Washington in 1996, and earned her PhD in economics from Princeton University in 2001, with a dissertation on international capital flows supervised by Ben Bernanke, Kenneth Rogoff and Pierre-Olivier Gourinchas. ¹

The Urdu article describes her origins in family terms, stating that her family is Malayali Hindu; no source names her own religious affiliation, and this museum records none for her. ³

Gopinath joined the University of Chicago Booth School of Business as an assistant professor in 2001 and moved to Harvard in 2005. In October 2018 she was appointed chief economist of the IMF, the first woman in the role. As chief economist she named the worldwide recession of 2020 "the Great Lockdown", and she co-authored the Fund's "Pandemic Paper", an international plan to end the COVID-19 pandemic with vaccination targets, which led to the creation of a multilateral task force of the IMF, World Bank, World Health Organization and World Trade Organization. From 21 January 2022 she served as first deputy managing director under Kristalina Georgieva, until 31 August 2025, and then returned to Harvard. ¹

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