Olivier Blanchard is the Robert M. Solow Professor of Economics emeritus at MIT. He joined the Peterson Institute for International Economics as the first C. Fred Bergsten Senior Fellow since 2015. A citizen of France, Blanchard has spent most of his professional life in Cambridge, MA. After obtaining his PhD in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1977, he taught at Harvard University, and returned to MIT in 1982. He was chair of the economics department from 1998 to 2003. In 2008, he took a leave of absence to be the economic counselor and director of the Research Department at the International Monetary Fund.