December 2016 NUI Galway’s Professor Alan Ahearne Appointed Director of the Whitaker Institute

Leading over 200 researchers fostering transformative, policy-relevant research

Alan Ahearne, Professor of Economics at NUI Galway, has been appointed Director of the University’s Whitaker Institute. With a 200-strong research team, the Whitaker Institute at NUI Galway delivers policy-focused research in areas such as business, economic development, public-sector innovation and reform, and sustainable and inclusive societies.

The Institute is named after the pioneering statesperson Dr T.K. Whitaker who served as General Secretary of Ireland’s Department of Finance from 1956 to 1969, during which time he steered Ireland’s transformational programme of trade liberalisation and structural reform He subsequently served as Governor of the Central Bank of Ireland.

Professor Ahearne, who is also a member of the Commission (Board) of the Central Bank of Ireland, said: “T.K. Whitaker set in motion a plan that put Ireland on a path of internationalisation. Throughout his illustrious career he demonstrated and implemented innovative ideas and approaches to challenges and issues facing our economy and society. This is what we endeavour to do here at the Whitaker Institute in the work we to by adopting a similarly innovative, multidisciplinary and transformative approach to the challenges currently facing business and society, both in Ireland and internationally.”

Professor Ahearne joined the J.E. Cairnes School of Business and Economics at NUI Galway in 2005. He is Chairman of the ESRI and Department of Finance Joint Research Programme on the Macroeconomy and Taxation. He has served as external adviser to the IMF, and was special economic adviser to Ireland’s former Minister for Finance Brian Lenihan from 2009 to 2011. He is a Non-Resident Fellow at Bruegel, the Brussels-based think tank, and a Visiting Executive Lecturer in the Darden Graduate School of Business Administration at the University of Virginia.

Before joining NUI Galway, Alan Ahearne was Senior Economist at the Federal Reserve Board in Washington, DC, where he worked for seven years. He has taught economics at Carnegie Mellon University, University College Dublin, Dublin City University, and the University of Limerick. He began his professional career with Coopers & Lybrand and also worked for Bank of Ireland.

Professor Ahearne lectures in the School of Economics at NUI Galway, where a flourishing and diverse academic environment integrates teaching and research, theory and empirical applications, in a policy-oriented and interdisciplinary way. There are approximately 1,800 undergraduate students of economics across several colleges, but mainly in the College of Business, Public Policy, and Law and in the College of Arts, Celtic Studies, and Social Sciences.

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