PETER BLAIR HENRY is the Class of 1984 Senior Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, a senior fellow at Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, and Dean Emeritus at New York University’s Leonard N. Stern School of Business.
The youngest person ever named to the Stern deanship, Peter served as dean from January 2010 through December 2017 and doubled the school’s average annual fundraising, while remaining research active. Peter is the former Konosuke Matsushita Professor of International Economics at the Stanford Graduate School of Business (2001–2006), where his research was funded by an NSF CAREER Award. He has authored numerous peer-reviewed articles in the flagship journals of economics and finance, and a book on global economic policy, Turnaround: Third World Lessons for First World Growth (Basic Books).
With financial support from the Hoover Institution and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, Peter leads the Ph.D. Excellence Initiative, a post-baccalaureate fellowship program designed to increase excellence within the economics profession by intentionally mentoring exceptional students, particularly from disadvantaged or first-generation college backgrounds, who demonstrate the greatest ability to bring important new perspectives to economic research and providing them with the resources and support needed for successful doctoral studies in the field. For his founding and leadership of the Initiative, Peter received the 2022 Impactful Mentoring Award from the American Economic Association, and a Career Achievement Award from the Samuel DuBois Cook Center on Social Equity at Duke University.
A vice chair of the boards of the National Bureau of Economic Research and the Economic Club of New York, Peter also serves on the boards of Citigroup and Nike. In 2015, he received the Foreign Policy Association Medal, the highest honor bestowed by the organization, and in 2016 he was honored as one of the Carnegie Foundation’s Great Immigrants.
Peter received his PhD in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Prior to his studies at MIT, Peter earned a Bachelor’s degree in mathematics from Oxford University, where he was a Rhodes Scholar and earned a full blue in basketball as a starting forward in the 1992 Varsity match, when Oxford trounced Cambridge 75-46.
Before rubbing shoulders with the British collegiate basketball elite, Peter earned a Bachelor’s degree in economics from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he was a Morehead Scholar, a member of Phi Beta Kappa, a reserve wide receiver on the football team, and a finalist in the 1991 campus-wide slam dunk competition.
Born in Kingston, Jamaica, in 1969, Henry became a U.S. citizen in 1986. He lives in Stanford and Düsseldorf with his wife and four sons.