Board Member Year: 2024

Kaneta SATO is Economic Counselor at the Embassy of Japan in Washington, D.C. — attached from the Cabinet Office of the Government of Japan. He joined the government as an economist in 1996. He has held various positions of economic research, forecasting and macroeconomic policy-making, including Director for Economic and Fiscal Projection, when he was responsible for medium- and long-term economic and fiscal projections.

He also has experience in budgeting at the Ministry of Finance in Japan during the Great Recession of 2008. In the academic field, he holds a Master degree in Economics from New York University and a B.A. from the University of Tokyo.

Lucio Vinhas de Souza is currently an Advisor to the leadership of the European External Action Service (EEAS), the EU’s “Department of State”. Before that, he led the Economics Team at the European Political Strategy Centre, an internal advisory body to the European Commission President. Prior to that, he was Managing Director and Sovereign Chief Economist at Moody’s Investors Service, based at its headquarters in New York. Before joining Moody’s, he was a World Bank official based in Washington, D.C. His main work areas are global macroeconomics, finance and country risk.

Michael Kurtzig was an international economist with the US Department of Agriculture, Economic Research Service until 2000. He joined the department in the late 1960s as a Middle East expert, first as a country desk officer, then as Assistant Branch Chief and then Chief of the Africa and Middle East Branch. He travelled extensively in the Middle East, particularly Turkey, Israel, Iran, Cyprus, as well as an analyst for Jordan. His work centered on agricultural foreign policy, data, and US trade. He wrote extensively on those subjects. He led a number of missions for the USDA, the World Bank, and USAID to Iran, Jordan, Turkey and Israel, as well as Gaza and the West Bank. After retirement he taught in Congregational and Day schools in Philadelphia and Alexandria on the Holocaust, Anti-Semitism, Hebrew, Israel and Jewish Communities around the World. He has been a member of NEC for many years and values the comradeship and the many excellent interesting speakers who keep us up to date and contribute to the knowledge base of the industry. He lives in DC with his wife Barbara and his rescue dog, Bob.

Ed Kean serves as Senior Economic Policy Analyst and Chief Editor for the Observatory Group. He has worked as an economic policy analyst for the Observatory Group since 2007. In that capacity, Ed has analyzed developments regarding US monetary, fiscal, trade and financial regulatory policy. Prior to joining the Observatory Group, he served as a senior Fed analyst for the G7 Group. Ed also has held various positions with the National Economists Club, including serving as President of the Club in 2011.

Rickinder (Ricky) Chima has been in DC since August 2021 covering the US economy and fiscal policy at the British Embassy, having previously worked in various roles as an economist in the UK Civil Service. He studied Economics at the University of Bristol and, later, at Master’s level at University College London.

Board of Governors

Aparna Mathur is a Senior Research Manager in Economics at Amazon and a Senior Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government. At Amazon, she tracks and conducts research to help identify labor and employment related challenges faced by Amazon’s domestic and global workforce, with a view to informing best policy. At the Kennedy School she is focusing on the COVID-19 safety net response. Prior to Amazon, she spent a year as a Senior Economist at the Council of Economic Advisers. She joined the Council as part of the COVID-19 response task force at the peak of the crisis in April 2020 and worked with epidemiologists on the health aspects of the crisis, while also tracking the economic downturn that came with the lockdowns. Prior to joining CEA, she was a resident scholar in economic policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute. At AEI, she directed the AEI-Brookings Project on Paid Family and Medical Leave, building bipartisan momentum on paid leave, for which she was recognized in the Politico 50 list for 2017. Her academic research has focused on income inequality and mobility, tax policy, labor markets and small businesses. She has published in several top scholarly journals including the Journal of Public Economics, the National Tax Journal and the Journal of Health Economics, testified several times before Congress and published numerous articles in the popular press on issues of policy relevance, including on her own blog at Forbes. Her work has been cited in leading news magazines such as the Economist, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post. She has regularly provided commentary on prominent radio and television shows such as NPR’s Marketplace and the Diane Rehm Show, as well as CNBC and C-SPAN. She has been an adjunct professor at Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy. She received her Ph.D. in economics from the University of Maryland, College Park in 2005, and is currently serving on the University of Maryland Economics Leadership Council. She is also on the Board of the National Academy of Social Insurance, Simply Green as well as the National Economists Club.