Exciting times, for an economist

Newton resident Lisa Lynch is dean of the Heller School for Social Policy and Management at Brandeis University. (Mike Lovett/Brandeis University)

Economist Lisa Lynch had her first lesson in the effects of economic downturn when she was a teenager and witnessed the decline of the brass industry in Waterbury, Conn.

Her father was a metallurgist and worked as a manager at a number of mills over the years, and she watched as one plant after another shut down.

"I saw all of the displacement and unemployment that occurred from that," said the Newton resident, dean of Brandeis University's Heller School for Social Policy and Management and chairwoman of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston's board of directors. "People were really challenged to reinvent their lives."

The experience, and how her father dealt with his challenges, ultimately helped shape her career path, she said.

"Although he lost his own job, his concern was the production workers who were calling him at home and asking him to look for opportunities for them," said Lynch, 52.

"I have this vivid memory of my father spending hours on the phone talking with one worker after another trying to help them strategize where they might find new opportunities."

On a wall of her Brandeis office hangs the record of the Senate roll call vote on 1996 legislation raising the minimum wage - a reminder of her time in Washington, D.C., serving as the Labor Department's chief economist during the Clinton administration. She had worked on the bill with her then-boss, Labor Secretary Robert Reich, and Massachusetts Senator Edward M. Kennedy.

Part of her job was to support the National Economic Council and bring together Cabinet secretaries to tackle economic issues that crossed agency lines. One of the unofficial requirements, Lynch said, was to be able to run efficiently on little sleep.

"This was actually handy for me because I'd given birth to my daughter three weeks before I started and she was pretty colicky," she said. "I worked a lot of hours and would be on conference calls in the middle of the night."

Lynch was also working during the shutdown of the federal government in 1995, when everything from social and education programs to the national parks temporarily came to a halt during a budget stalemate between Congress and President Clinton.

"From a public policy point of view it was a defining moment in this country," said Lynch. "It was very exciting to be in a front row seat participating in that."

Lynch's family moved to Buffalo just before she began her senior year of high school. It was difficult, she said, going from a small Catholic girls school to a big city school, but it was there that Lynch took her first economics course, which focused on issues of social justice.

One project that she worked on involved interviewing inmates at the Attica Correctional Facility right after the 1971 riot there. "I spoke with a group of four inmates on a release program about conditions in the prison, the circumstances that resulted in their incarceration, and the challenges that their families were facing trying to support themselves," said Lynch.

The men, all African-Americans, also talked about the role of race and racism in their lives - a theme in Lynch's doctoral thesis and in her other research.

"Education and training alone isn't a magic elixir," explained Lunch. "You need to have opportunity, identify discrimination, and understand that people's circumstances and how they become labeled are carried with them through their working experience."

Lynch's foray into economics accompanied her passion for music. Her life ambition in high school, she said, was to play Dvorak's Cello Concerto for the New York Philharmonic with Leonard Bernstein conducting - but her parents had a different plan.

Concerned about her ability to support herself as a musician, they urged her to look for a school with strong programs in both music and liberal arts. She entered Wellesley College in 1974. The decision was tough at the time, said Lynch, until she heard Yo-Yo Ma perform on the cello.

"He was my age and a freshman at Harvard at the time," said Lynch. "The wisdom of my parents really came through after hearing him play. I felt it was time to come up with a Plan B."

She spent her junior year at the London School of Economics. It was there that she met her future husband, Fabio Schiantarelli, a native of Italy who was doing graduate studies in economics, and now is a professor at Boston College.

"He has been my best friend and best critic for 32 years," said Lynch.

After finishing her senior year at Wellesley College, Lynch returned to the London School of Economics for her doctorate. She was one of 10 women in a class with 120 men. The experience is something else she has carried into her career, she said, "having seen the challenges that women faced in economics, including the low expectations . . . one of the most poisonous forms of discrimination because it's indirect."

She has taken an active role in the American Economics Association's Committee on the Status of Women in the Economics Profession, serving as chairwoman in 2006 and 2007.

Lynch said her first job out of graduate school, lecturing at the University of Bristol in England, was fantastic but paid barely $10,000; facing $40,000 in student loans, she returned stateside for a teaching job at Ohio State University.

Lynch has also held positions at the Sloan School of Management at MIT, and the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University.

A decade after her two-year stint in Washington, Lynch spends her time on the Brandeis campus in Waltham developing teaching programs for the next generation of social policy leaders.

She said that last semester she was talking with master's degree students preparing to graduate this spring, and they voiced concern about job prospects in the current economy.

"I told them that I couldn't imagine a better time for someone in the area of social policy to be coming out," said Lynch. "All of our institutions - from financial to social to labor market - are going to have to be reinvented."

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