Rachel Lipson

Rachel Lipson is a Research Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government, a Resident Scholar at the Aspen Institute Economic Strategy Group, and a non-resident senior fellow at Brookings Metro. Her current research focuses on a new generation of technical jobs—many fueled by AI and other emerging technologies—that do not require a four-year degree. She is studying the labor market experience of U.S. “frontier regions” at the forefront of producing critical technologies such as data centers, chips, quantum, nuclear energy, aerospace, biomanufacturing, and batteries.From 2023 to 2025, Rachel served as a Senior Policy Advisor at the U.S. Department of Commerce’s CHIPS Program Office, where she helped launch the workforce strategy for the $50 billion federal investment to revitalize domestic semiconductor manufacturing. Prior to joining the federal government, Rachel served as the inaugural director of the Project on Workforce at Harvard, a cross-university initiative focused on creating better pathways between education and the labor market. Rachel is the co-editor of America’s Hidden Economic Engines (Harvard Education Press 2023), a well-regarded volume that has helped catalyze community college reform efforts nationwide. Her writing has appeared in The Boston Globe, Washington Post, Newsweek, and The Hill, and her research has been featured by C-SPAN, NPR, Bloomberg, The Economist, and MIT Technology Review. She has also held economic policy roles across the public, private, and nonprofit sectors, including at the World Bank, JPMorgan Chase, Obama for America, and Year Up. She currently serves as an Expert Advisor to Goodman Philanthropies, a new philanthropy dedicated to improving economic mobility in the United States. Rachel graduated magna cum laude in Government from Harvard College and holds an MBA and MPP from Harvard Business School and Harvard Kennedy School.