Minouche Shafik
Nemat "Minouche" Shafik is an economist, policymaker, and higher education leader who will become the 20th President of Columbia University in the City of New York on July 1, 2023. For more than three decades, she has served in senior leadership roles across a range of prominent international and academic institutions. Since 2017 she has been President and Vice Chancellor of the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), one of the world’s leading centers for research and teaching in the social sciences.
Before her tenure at LSE, Shafik served as Deputy Governor of the Bank of England, where she led work on fighting misconduct in financial markets and was responsible for a balance sheet of about $600 billion; Deputy Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund, where she helped navigate turbulence surrounding the European debt crisis and the Arab Spring; Permanent Secretary of the United Kingdom’s Department for International Development, where she helped secure the UK’s commitment to giving 0.7% of GDP in aid and focused it on fighting poverty in the poorest countries in the world; and the youngest-ever Vice President of the World Bank, where she worked on the institution’s first-ever report on the environment, led work on infrastructure and private sector investment, and advised governments in post-communist Eastern Europe. She also serves as a trustee of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the British Museum, and BRAC, the world’s largest non-governmental organization.
Shafik earned a BA from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, an MSc from LSE, and a DPhil from St Antony's College, Oxford. She has received a life peerage and membership of the House of Lords, a damehood for services to the global economy, an honorary fellowship of the British Academy, and several honorary degrees.
She is married to Raffael Jovine, a molecular biologist, with whom she has two college-aged children and three adult stepchildren.