Carmen M. Reinhart is the Minos Zombanakis Professor of the International Financial System at the Harvard Kennedy School. She was previously the Dennis Weatherstone Senior Fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics and professor of economics and director of the Center for International Economics at the University of Maryland. She was earlier chief economist and vice president at the investment bank Bear Stearns in the 1980s and spent several years at the International Monetary Fund. She is a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, research fellow at the Centre for Economic Policy Research, and member of the Congressional Budget Office Panel of Economic Advisers and Council on Foreign Relations. She has served on many editorial boards and has frequently testified before Congress.

Reinhart's work has helped to inform the understanding of financial crises for over a decade. Her numerous papers on macroeconomics, international finance, and trade have been published in leading scholarly journals. She is coauthor of A Decade of Debt (2011) and Assessing Financial Vulnerability: An Early Warning System for Emerging Markets (2000). Her best-selling book (with Kenneth S. Rogoff) entitled This Time Is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly (Princeton University Press, 2009), which has been translated into 13 languages, documents the striking similarities of the recurring booms and busts that have characterized financial history. She received her PhD from Columbia University.