For Catherine L. Mann ’77, a career in economics—including positions with the Federal Reserve’s Board of Governors and the President’s Council of Economic Advisers—began with babysitting.

Put in simple economic terms, the laws of supply and demand led the vice president of an econometric forecasting firm to offer his children’s babysitter a summer job entering data into his company’s primitive computers during the early ’70s.

A Harvard degree and MIT PhD later, Mann has found herself shaping economic policy at some of the nation’s most powerful policy making institutions, in addition to starting a family of her own.

She currently serves as a senior fellow at the Institute for International Economics, an independent non-profit thinktank in Washington D.C.

“In terms of her successful career as an economist, [Mann] has benefited from her perseverance as well as her ability to think independently,” says Susan M. Collins ’80, who attended graduate school with Mann at MIT and is now a professor of economics at Georgetown University.

Mann’s current research focuses on the ways in which technology issues affect international economic policies.

She says she often travels to developing countries, including India, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh, to explain to their policy makers how technology is important to their growth.

As an example of technology’s economic importance, Mann describes the way in which the Internet can communicate data about diseases and lead to prevention and eradication in certain countries.

“I really believe that I’m helping policy to be better, and that better policy means better outcome for individuals and for countries,” she says.

While Mann says she has always focused on international economic issues, her specialization in technology has developed recently with the technological boom.

At the Federal Reserve, where she worked as the assistant director in the international finance division until 1997, she says she focused on issues such as GDP growth and exchange rates.

But Mann says she was drawn to the Institute, where she currently works, because it gave her more freedom and opportunities in her research.

A Worthwhile Investment

Mann says she spent much of her time at Harvard working at WHRB, the campus radio station.