Tuesday, April 25, 2023
1 p.m. – 2 p.m.
South Common Room, 111 Thayer Street
Lunch will be provided.
Students are invited to a lunchtime discussion with Elizabeth Reynolds, former Senior Advisor to President Biden for Manufacturing and Economic Development, and former Executive Director of the MIT Task Force on the Work of the Future.
Elisabeth Reynolds is a Lecturer in the MIT Department of Urban Studies and Planning where her research encompasses national and regional systems of innovation as well as manufacturing ecosystems and scale up. She was Special Assistant to the President for Manufacturing and Economic Development at the National Economic Council until October, 2022. During her time at the White House, she helped lead the Administration’s work on supply chain challenges, national manufacturing strategy, regional economic development and the broader industrial policy agenda.
Before joining the White House, Reynolds was the executive director of the MIT Industrial Performance Center as well as the MIT Task Force on the Work of the Future, an interdisciplinary Institute-wide initiative exploring the changing relationship between new technologies and the nature of work.
Prior to coming to MIT, Reynolds worked with Michael Porter of HBS at the Initiative for a Competitive Inner City, a non-profit focused on business, job growth and cluster growth in underserved urban communities.
She has worked on rebuilding manufacturing capabilities in the U.S. at the federal and state level, serving on the scale up committee of the Obama Administration’s Advanced Manufacturing Partnership (AMP) as well as Massachusetts Governor Charlie Baker’s Advanced Manufacturing Collaborative. She sits on the board of the non-profit, Advanced Functional Fabrics of America, one of the 16 Manufacturing USA innovation institutes.
Reynolds holds a B.A. in government from Harvard, a Master’s in Economics from the University of Montreal as well as a Ph.D. from MIT’s Department of Urban Studies and Planning.