Dr. Lisa Cook was the first Black woman to serve on the Federal Reserve’s Board of Governors. Just a few years later, in 2025, President Donald Trump made an unprecedented attempt to remove her from that historic role.
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Cook pushed back. “I will continue to carry out my duties to help the American economy as I have been doing since 2022,” she responded. Appointed by former U.S. President Joe Biden, she — like many Black women in economics — has faced opposition at nearly every turn.
Cook’s résumé, however, speaks for itself. She’s notably advised presidents from both parties, serving in the Treasury Department under Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, and later on Barack Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers. Outside of politics, she worked as a professor at Michigan State University. With that in mind, here are 12 things you should know about Lisa Cook.
1. She was the first Black woman ever to serve on the Federal Reserve Board
After being nominated by President Biden, Cook became the first Black woman ever to serve on the Federal Reserve Board of Governors in 2022. Her confirmation came down to a narrow 51-50 party-line vote, with former Vice President Kamala Harris casting the tie-breaking vote.
2. She’s a Georgia native
Born in 1964, she was born and raised in Milledgeville, Georgia. Her father served as a chaplain before moving into senior leadership at the state hospital. Meanwhile, Lisa’s mother taught nursing at Georgia College and State University, which meant she spent plenty of time on campus as a child.
3. She taught at Michigan State University
Dr. Cook became a Professor of Economics and International Relations at Michigan State University. According to MSU’s directory, her research interests are: “economic growth and development, financial institutions and markets, innovation, and economic history.”
4. She worked as a senior economist under former President Barack Obama
From 2011 to 2012, she worked as a senior economist on the Council of Economic Advisers during the Obama administration. A little over a decade earlier, she was a senior adviser on finance and development in the Treasury Department’s Office of International Affairs, serving under both Bill Clinton and George W. Bush.
5. The scar above her right eye stems from a racial attack she faced as a kid
Cook was only two or three years old when she first encountered racism firsthand. At her Georgia nursery school, other children hurled a racial slur before attacking her, which resulted in a permanent scar above her right eye. “It wasn’t until much later that I understood that that word was associated with violence, with racial violence, and its true history,” she remembered during a conversation with the International Monetary Fund.
6. She’s cousins with chemical synthesis pioneer Percy Julian
The former professor comes from a lineage of trailblazers in African American history, including her cousin Percy Julian. He became the first African American to lead a major corporate laboratory and, perhaps most notably, pioneered a more efficient method for synthesizing cortisone.
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“His house was firebombed twice. We wouldn’t have that if they had been successful — if whoever firebombed his house had been successful,” Cook recalled on the “Planet Money” podcast.
7. She’s the first Federal Reserve governor a president attempted to remove
In August 2025, Trump announced that he was removing Cook from the Federal Reserve over allegations of mortgage fraud from before her time on the board. Notably, no president had ever tried to oust a Fed governor before.
Cook, however, didn’t back down. She responded, “President Trump purported to fire me ‘for cause’ when no cause exists under the law, and he has no authority to do so. I will not resign. I will continue to carry out my duties to help the American economy as I have been doing since 2022.” Regardless, Cook’s term is slated to run through January 2038.
8. She earned her PhD in Economics from UC Berkeley
According to her biography, Cook received a PhD in economics from the University of California, Berkeley. Her fields of study were macroeconomics and international economics.
9. Her mother has a background in education
Lisa’s mother, Professor Mary Murray Cook, was the first African American faculty member to earn tenure at Georgia College, where she taught nursing for 17 years. She also broke barriers as the school’s first tenured Black faculty member — paving the way for greater representation on campus. Lisa has described GCSU as being “in many ways” her home growing up, and while speaking at the university’s 2024 commencement, she shared that her mom helped establish a Delta Sigma Theta chapter on campus.
10. She was the first student from Spelman College to win a Marshall Scholarship
As a student at Atlanta’s Spelman College, Cook became the first from the historically Black women’s institution to win a Marshall Scholarship. She later went on to complete her bachelor’s degree at the University of Oxford in England. “[I] was humbled to be the first Spelman student to receive it,” she shared at the 2024 Marshall Forum.
11. Her uncle was Samuel DeBois Cook
As mentioned before, the Cooks left a strong mark in many fields. Lisa’s uncle, Samuel DeBois Cook, was a political scientist and the first African American professor at Duke University. According to Bloomberg, he was even a classmate of Martin Luther King Jr. at one point. What a coincidence, and what a legacy.
12. She has argued that economics is unwelcoming to Black women
Cook knows the economics world all too well, especially how unwelcoming it can be for women, and even more so for women of color. In her 2019 op-ed for The New York Times, she pointed out that only two percent of bachelor’s degrees in economics were awarded to Black women. Even fewer stay in the field due to discrimination in areas like publication citations, Cook and Anna Gifty Opoku-Agyeman wrote.
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“Economics is neither a welcoming nor a supportive profession for women,” they argued. “But if economics is hostile to women, it is especially antagonistic to Black women.”
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