Roger B. Porter
Roger B. Porter is a business professor, currently appointed IBM Professor of Business and Government in the Kennedy School at Harvard University. He is also master of one of the twelve undergraduate houses at Harvard and a senior scholar in the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D. C. He served as director of the Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government at Harvard on two occasions, from 1995 to 2000 and from 2008 to 2011.
He has served for more than a decade in senior economic policy positions in the White House, including Assistant to the President for Economic and Domestic Policy (1989–1993), director of the White House Office of Policy Development in the Reagan Administration, and as Executive Secretary of the President’s Economic Policy Board during the Ford Administration. He is a member of the President’s Commission on White House Fellows (appointed Acting Chairman during the George Bush Administration) and a member of the board of directors of the White House Historical Association. He serves as a trustee of the Gerald R. Ford Foundation and a member of the advisory board of The Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M University. He was a White House Fellow from 1974 to 1975.
Porter was born on June 19, 1946. He earned his bachelor’s degree in political science from Brigham Young University. After serving as a missionary for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, of which he is a member, he was selected as a Rhodes Scholar and a Woodrow Wilson Fellow and earned his BPhil degree from Oxford University. He went on to earn both a master’s and doctorate degree from Harvard University.
He is the author of several books on economic policy, including New Directions in Financial Services Regulation, Presidential Decision Making and Efficiency, and Equity and Legitimacy: The Multilateral Trading System at the Millennium.
He also sits on the board of directors of Tenneco, Zions Bancorporation, Pactiv, Right Choice Managed Care, Packaging Corporation of America, and Extra Space Storage, Inc. He and his wife, Ann Robinson, are the parents of three children.
