PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — Brown University President Christina Paxson, an economist and professor of economics and public policy, will serve as deputy chair of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston’s board of directors for 2019.

The Federal Reserve Board noted Paxson’s appointment in announcing on Wednesday, Jan. 9, the chairs and deputy chairs for each of the 12 Federal Reserve Banks across the nation.

Paxson has served as a member of the Boston Fed’s board of directors since 2016, and the appointment to deputy chair positions her to serve as board chair in 2020. Upon her initial appointment to the board three years ago, she noted the importance of the country’s central bank in promoting growth and financial stability.

“The Federal Reserve is an essential institution for ensuring economic security and innovation in the region and the nation as a whole,” Paxson said in 2016. “I am honored to have this opportunity to help guide its efforts to realize the aspirations and advance the well-being of people across New England.”

As one of the leaders of the Boston Fed, Paxson has helped to guide the bank’s work across New England, which includes conducting economic research, participating in monetary policymaking, supervising financial institutions, providing financial services and payments, playing a leadership role in the payments industry, and supporting economic well-being in communities.

A noted higher education leader and economist, Paxson has consistently applied economic analysis to the welfare of broadly important, though vulnerable, populations in her decades of research and teaching. At Princeton, where she began her professorial career in 1986, she was the founding director of the Center for the Economics and Demography of Aging. In 2000, she founded the Center for Health and Wellbeing, a research center in the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs.

Over the years, her research increasingly focused on the relationship of economic factors to health and welfare over the life course, particularly on the health and welfare of children. In 2008, Paxson became chair of Princeton’s economics department and then dean of the Woodrow Wilson School. In 2012, the same year she was elected vice president of the American Economic Association, she became the 19th president of Brown.

She has been the principal investigator on a number of research projects supported by the National Institutes of Health, authored or co-authored numerous journal articles, received an honorary degree from Williams College in 2018 and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.