Cecilia Elena Rouse is the Katzman-Ernst Professor in Economics and Education and professor of economics and public affairs. Rouse is also president of the Brookings Institution. She served for the first two years of the Biden-Harris Administration as Chair of the Council of Economic Advisers (CEA). Rouse is the first Black American to fill the role (confirmed with 95 votes in the U.S. Senate) in the CEA's 75-year history. It was her third White House tour of duty, serving her third President. She is the former dean of the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs. A labor economist with a focus on the economics of education, Rouse is the founding director of the Princeton Education Research Section and a member of the American Philosophical Society and the National Academy of Education. She has served as senior editor of The Future of Children, a policy journal published by the School and the Brookings Institution, co-editor of the Journal of Labor Economics, on the editorial board the American Economic Journal: Economic Policy and other journals. She previously served on the boards of the Council of Foreign Relations, University of Rhode Island and the National Bureau of Economic Research, and was an independent director of the T. Rowe Price Funds.

From 2009 to 2011, Rouse served as a member of President Barack Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers. She worked at the National Economic Council in the Clinton administration as a Special Assistant to the President from 1998 to 1999.

Rouse joined the Princeton faculty in 1992 after earning her Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University, where she also completed her undergraduate work.