Karen Mills Elected Chair of NBER Board of Directors; Douglas Peterson Elected Vice Chair

Karen Mills was elected Chair of the NBER’s Board of Directors, and Douglas Peterson was elected Vice Chair, at the board’s September 28 meeting.

Mills, who has served as Vice Chair for the last three years, is a leading authority on US competitiveness, entrepreneurship, and innovation. She is the president of Tootsie Roll Industries, an American manufacturer of confectionery products. From 2014 to 2025 she was a senior fellow on the entrepreneurship faculty at Harvard Business School. She served in President Barack Obama's Cabinet as Administrator of the US Small Business Administration from 2009 to 2013 and was a member of the National Economic Council. She is the author of Fintech, Small Business & the American Dream, and numerous other publications on innovation and the supply chain economy. She serves on the board of directors of Skillsoft, an educational technology company, as a director of several Churchill Capital entities. She is a past member of the Harvard Corporation and a past Vice Chair of the Harvard Overseers. Mills earned an undergraduate degree in economics from Harvard and an MBA from Harvard Business School, where she was a Baker Scholar.

Mills succeeds Peter Henry, the Class of 1984 Senior Fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution and dean emeritus of New York University's Stern School of Business, who served as board Chair from 2023 to 2026. 

Peterson, who was elected to the NBER board in 2017, is a senior advisor to S&P Global. He was President and Chief Executive Officer from 2013 until November 2024. He joined the company in 2011 as President of Standard & Poor’s Ratings. During his tenure, he repositioned S&P Global to power the global capital and commodity markets of the future with transparent, innovative, and independent credit ratings, benchmarks, analytics and data. Before joining S&P Global, he served as the Chief Operating Officer of Citibank, where he had also been CEO of Citigroup Japan as well as Chief Auditor. A leading voice on sustainability and the energy transition, he serves on the board of the UN Global Compact as well as a range of other nonprofit business-related, academic, and arts organizations. He received his undergraduate degree from Claremont McKenna College and an MBA from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.