About the Cook Center Career Achievement Award
The Samuel DuBois Cook Center on Social Equity Career Achievement Award celebrates individuals who have demonstrated exceptional dedication and impact in advancing social equity, championed the cause of social justice, and inspired meaningful change in their communities. The Career Achievement Award stands as a tribute to the enduring legacy of Dr. Samuel DuBois Cook, an extraordinary figure in the pursuit of social justice and equality.
2024 Career Achievement Award Recipients
The Samuel DuBois Cook Center on Social Equity awarded three Career Achievement Awards on Monday, April 1, 2024, in Washington D.C. To read our coverage of the event, click here.
Cecilia Elena Rouse, PhD
Cecilia Elena Rouse is the president of the Brookings Institution. From 2021 to 2023, she served as Chair of the Council of Economic Advisers (CEA), the first Black American to fill that role in the CEAâs 75-year history. Confirmed with 95 votes in the U.S. Senate, she served as CEA Chair while on public service leave from Princeton University, where she joined the faculty in 1992. While at Princeton, she also served as dean of the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs from 2012 to 2021. She is the Universityâs Katzman-Ernst Professor in Economics and Education and a professor of economics and public 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 served as senior editor of The Future of Children, a policy journal published by Princeton and the Brookings Institution, co-editor of the Journal of Labor Economics, and on the editorial boards of the American Economic Journal: Economic Policy and other journals. She previously served on the boards of the Council of Foreign Relations, MDRC, the National Bureau of Economic Research, and the University of Rhode Island, and was an independent director of the T. Rowe Price Funds.
Rouseâs time as CEA chair was her third White House tour of duty. She served as a member of the Council of Economic Advisers from 2009 to 2011, and as Special Assistant to the President at the National Economic council from 1998 to 1999. Rouse earned both her doctoral degree in economics and her bachelorâs degree from Harvard University
Governor Lisa D. Cook, PhD
Lisa D. Cook took office as a member of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System on May 23, 2022, to fill an unexpired term ending January 31, 2024. She was reappointed to the Board on September 8, 2023, and sworn in on September 13, 2023, for a term ending January 31, 2038.
Prior to her appointment to the Board, Dr. Cook was a professor of economics and international relations at Michigan State University. From 2018 to 2021, she was director of the American Economic Association Summer Training Program. She was also a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research.
Previously, Dr. Cook was on the faculty of Harvard Universityâs Kennedy School of Government. During her time at Harvard, Dr. Cook also served as deputy director for Africa Research at the Center for International Development. Before then, she was a National Fellow at Stanford University.
From 2011 to 2012, Dr. Cook served as a senior economist on the Council of Economic Advisers under President Barack Obama. From 2000 to 2001, she served as a senior adviser on finance and development in the U.S. Department of Treasuryâs Office of International Affairs. Dr. Cook received a BA in philosophy from Spelman College. As a Marshall Scholar, she received a second BA in philosophy, politics, and economics from Oxford University. She earned a PhD in economics from the University of California, Berkeley
Peter Blair Henry, PhD
Peter Blair Henry is the Class of 1984 Senior Fellow at Stanford Universityâs Hoover Institution, Senior Fellow at Stanfordâs Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI), and Dean Emeritus of New York Universityâs Leonard N. Stern School of Business. The youngest person ever named to the Stern Deanship, Peter served as Dean from January 2010 through December 2017 and doubled the schoolâs average annual fundraising. Formerly the Konosuke Matsushita Professor of International Economics at Stanford Universityâs Graduate School of Business, from 2001â2006 Peterâs research was funded by an NSF CAREER Award, and he has authored numerous peer-reviewed articles in the flagship journals of economics and finance, as well as a book on global economic policy, Turnaround: Third World Lessons for First World Growth (Basic Books).
Chair of the Board of the National Bureau of Economic Research, Peter also serves on the Boards of Citigroup, Nike, and Analog. In 2015, he received the Foreign Policy Association Medal, the highest honor bestowed by the organization, and in 2016 he was honored as one of the Carnegie Foundationâs Great Immigrants.
With financial support from the Hoover Institution and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, Peter leads the Ph.D. Excellence Initiative (PhDEI), a post-baccalaureate program designed to address underrepresentation in economics by mentoring exceptional students interested in pursuing doctoral studies in the field. For his leadership of the PhDEI, Peter received the 2022 Impactful Mentoring Award from the American Economic Association.
Peter received his PhD in economics from MIT and Bachelorâs degrees from Oxford University, where he was a Rhodes Scholar, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he was a Morehead-Cain Scholar, a member of Phi Beta Kappa, a reserve wide receiver on the football team, and a finalist in the 1991 campus-wide slam dunk competition.
Born in Kingston, Jamaica, in 1969, Peter became a U.S. citizen in 1986. He lives in Stanford and DĂźsseldorf with his wife and four sons.
2023 Career Achievement Award Recipient:
William Edward Spriggs
The Samuel DuBois Cook Center on Social Equity recognizes William Edward Spriggs (1955-2023) as the first recipient of the Cook Centerâs Career Achievement Award. Spriggs, who completed his Ph.D. in economics at the University of Wisconsin Madison in 1984, always believed âand lived out the belief unswervinglyâsocial science inquiry must be directed to the public good. An unabashed proponent of workersâ rights and racial justice, he never drew a line between rigorous scholarship and policy advocacy. In fact, he always believed that meticulous research and wise social action must inform one another in reciprocal fashion.
The intersection of scholarship and advocacy is well represented by the fact, at the close of his life, he simultaneously held positions as Professor of Economics at Howard University and chief economist for the labor federation, the AFL-CIO. Deeply committed to the mission of HBCUs, prior to joining the faculty at Howard, Spriggs taught economics at North Carolina A&T State University and Norfolk State University.
Before becoming chief economist for the AFL-CIO, Spriggsâ record of public policymaking engagement already was exemplary. In the early 1990s he worked with the Economic Policy Institute, leaving in 1993 to serve as the director designate of the National Commission for Employment Policy in the Clinton administration. Subsequently, he served as a senior economist for the Joint Economic Committee. In 1998, he began a tenure as the executive director of the Institute for Opportunity and Equality League. During the Obama administration, Spriggs was appointed as assistant secretary of policy in the Department of Labor.
Spriggsâ research activity spanned the subject areas of anti-black labor market discrimination, worker safety and compensation standards, the impact of minimum wage laws, the black-white unemployment rate gap, and the comparative benefits for black students from attending a HBCU versus a PWI. He was well known as the go-to media expert for analysis of the Bureau of Labor Statistics monthly reports on American unemployment. His work, in the mid-1990s, refuting the claim that inclusion of Armed Forces Qualifying Test Scores in the analysis eliminated evidence of anti-black employment discrimination was of signal importance in restoring the case for sustaining and improving anti-discrimination measures.
His Ph.D. dissertation at Wisconsin, a study of obstacles to black wealth accumulation based upon archival research on property ownership in Virginia during the early 20th century, received the 1985 best dissertation award from the National Economic Association. In 2000, he would serve as president of the organization.
Spriggsâ final major project was his service as member of the team providing advice to the California Reparations Task Force on how best to assign monetary values to the harms and damages incurred by black Californians due to racism in the state. His thoughtful deliberation and keen insight was essential to the development of the suggestions the advisory team put forward to the Task Force.
Perhaps William Spriggsâ most important attribute as a scholar-activist was his courage. He never would compromise his position on issues for the sake of professional advancement. Integrity, for him, required the strength to bear the costs of departing from sheer careerism to say what needs to be said. In this context, his powerful open letter to the economics profession in that aftermath of George Floydâs murder must be mentioned. In the letter, Spriggs indicted white supremacy in the economics profession, including the tendency of white economists to continue to assume, despite his own work in the 1990s, employment discrimination cannot persist, to implicitly or explicitly assume black inferiority, and to ignore and/or fail to cite the work of black economists altogether.
With deep conviction and dedication to the use of economics as an instrument to serve in the public interest, William Spriggs is both an aspirational and an inspirational figure for us all.
