Gita Gopinath

Gita Gopinath was born on 8 December 1971, in Kolkata, India in a Malayali family from Kannur, Kerala. She is the younger of two daughters of T.V. Gopinath and V.C. Vijayalakshmi. Her family is related to the late A. K. Gopalan.

She studied at Nirmala Convent School in Mysore. She received a B.A. degree from Lady Shri Ram College for Women of the University of Delhi in 1992 and an M.A. degree in economics from Delhi School of Economics, also of the University of Delhi, in 1994. She further completed an M.A. degree at the University of Washington in 1996. She earned her Ph.D. in economics from Princeton University in 2001 after completing a doctoral dissertation titled "Three essays on international capital flows: a search theoretic approach", under the supervision of Ben Bernanke, Kenneth Rogoff, and Pierre-Olivier Gourinchas. She was awarded the Princeton's Woodrow Wilson Fellowship Research Award while doing her doctoral research at Princeton.

In 2001, she joined the University of Chicago Booth School of Business as an assistant professor. In 2005 she moved to Harvard University's economics department, where she served as the John Zwanstra Professor of International Studies and Economics through 2022. In Harvard she co-authored papers such as The Macroeconomics of Border Taxes and Dominant Currency Paradigm.

In October 2018, Gopinath was appointed chief economist of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), becoming the first woman to hold the post. As part of her initiatives, she co-authored the "Pandemic Paper", an international plan on how to end the COVID-19 pandemic that set globally endorsed targets for vaccinating the world. This work led to the creation of the Multilateral Task Force made up of the leadership of the IMF itself, World Bank, World Health Organization (WHO), and World Trade Organization (WTO) to help end the pandemic and the establishment of a working group with vaccine manufacturers to identify trade barriers, supply bottlenecks, and accelerate the delivery of COVID-19 vaccines to low-income and lower-middle income countries (see also: Economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic).

In December 2021, Gopinath was elevated as the fund's new first deputy managing director (FDMD), the number two position at the fund. Gopinath had been earlier scheduled to return to her academic position at Harvard University in January 2022 on completion of her term as chief economist. Kristalina Georgieva added that "given that the pandemic has led to an increase in the scale and scope of the macroeconomic challenges facing our member countries, Gita—universally recognized as one of the world's leading macroeconomists—has precisely the expertise that we need for the FDMD role at this point. Indeed, her particular skill set—combined with her years of experience at the Fund as Chief Economist—make her uniquely well qualified. She is the right person at the right time."

As the first deputy managing director of the IMF, Gopinath represents the fund at multilateral forums, maintains high-level contacts with member governments and board members, the media, and other institutions, leads the fund's work on surveillance and related policies, oversees research, and flagship publications and the work of senior staff. Gopinath was earlier the co-director of the international finance and macroeconomics program at the National Bureau of Economic Research, a visiting scholar at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, a member of the economic advisory panel of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, economic adviser to the chief minister of Kerala, a co-editor at the American Economic Review, and a co-editor of the 2019 edition of the Handbook of International Economics.

In June 2021, Gopinath was appointed to the World Bank–International Monetary Fund High-Level Advisory Group (HLAG) on Sustainable and Inclusive Recovery and Growth, co-chaired by Mari Pangestu, Ceyla Pazarbasioglu, and Nicholas Stern.

She rejoined Harvard in 2025 as the Gregory and Ania Coffey professor of Economics.

Gopinath is a naturalized American citizen and an overseas citizen of India. She is married to Iqbal Singh Dhaliwal, her classmate from the Delhi School of Economics. The couple have a child.