Gita Gopinath

The challenge to build resilience fuelled by a world that demands it.

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She’s young, she’s pretty and she’s full of vim and vigour. American-Indian economist Gita Gopinath has had her fair share of challenges and learnings as the first Deputy Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), since 21 January 2022. Stepping away from these duties in August 2025 she returns to Harvard as professor to joust with her students through debates and exchange ideas on campus. She looks forward to pushing the research frontier in international finance and macroeconomics to address global challenges, and to training the next generation of economists, she said in a statement.

In her opening remarks at a recent conference on “Sri Lanka’s Road to Recovery: Debt and Governance” in Colombo, Gopinath pointed out that nations worldwide are being tested by shocks that are more frequent and more complex with the global economy facing powerful crosscurrents—slowing growth, rising tariffs, and a rapidly changing global economic order alongside profound uncertainty.