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Jeffrey R. Brown is the Larry Gies Family Chair in Business at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.  Jeff is an economist who has published extensively on topics related to lifelong financial security, including annuities, long-term care, Social Security, public and private pensions, and individual financial decision-making. He is former Director of the NBER Retirement Research Center and the University of Illinois Center for Business and Public Policy. He earned his Ph.D. in economics from MIT, his Masters in Public Policy from Harvard, and his BA from Miami University in Ohio.

From 2015-2024, Jeff served as Dean of the Gies College of Business at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he also served as a professor of finance since 2002. As Dean, he has led the Gies College through a series of transformational changes, including a new name and brand, the largest philanthropic campaign in the school’s history, an innovative new enrollment risk management strategy, and the launch of the highly innovative online iMBA that has grown to become one of the largest and fastest growing MBA programs in the world. He also successfully led Gies Business through the Covid-19 global pandemic. For his innovative leadership through challenging times, Jeff was named by Poets and Quants as the 2021 Business School Dean of the Year.

Jeff also draws upon his experience in government and the private sector. He has fifteen years of corporate governance experience as a board member for TIAA, a Fortune 100 financial services company. He currently chairs the TIAA Risk and Compliance Committee and has previously chaired the Audit Committee and the Investment Committee.  From 2016-2022, Jeff also served on the Governing Board for the Center for Audit Quality. He has also served previously as a Senior Economist with the White House Council of Economic Advisers, as an Economist on the President’s Commission to Strengthen Social Security, as a Presidential appointee to the Social Security Advisory Board, and as a member of the 2015 Social Security Technical Panel. Prior to graduate school, Jeff served as a Brand Manager at the Procter & Gamble Company.