Karin Lissakers

"Karin Lissakers currently serves as chief advisor to George Soros on globalization issues. Before joining Soros, Karin Lissakers held the post of U.S. Executive Director on the Executive Board of the International Monetary Fund from 1993 to 2001, representing the Fund’s largest shareholder during a period of turmoil in international financial markets and a U.S.-led effort to redesign the international financial architecture and reform the IMF. Karin Lissakersworked closely with the Secretary of the Treasury and other high-level U.S. and international officials. The executive directorship is a presidential appointment with U.S. Senate confirmation.

"Karin Lissakers has extensive policy experience at senior levels in the executive branch of the Federal Government and in the U.S. Congress. She was deputy director of the Policy Planning Staff of the U.S. Department of State, and staff director of the foreign economic policy subcommittee of the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

"Karin Lissakers lectured on international banking issues at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs and became director of the school’s international business and banking studies program. Karin Lissakers was a senior associate with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and worked as a researcher with the Nobel prize-winning economist Gunnar Myrdal, and as a research associate at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.

"Karin Lissakers has written extensively on foreign economic policy and on business-government relations in the international economic arena. Her book Banks, Borrowers and the Establishment (Basic Books 1991) has been called the definitive post-mortem of the 1980s international debt crisis. Karin Lissakers is the author of numerous studies, articles and Congressional reports on subjects including international banking, sovereign debt restructuring, Western economic aid and commercial relations with the former Soviet Union, national policy toward foreign direct investment, NAFTA, expanding U.S. Latin American economic relations. Her articles have appeared in The New York Times, the Washington Post, Foreign Policy, the Journal of International Affairs and other publications."

In 2006 she became the head of the Revenue Watch Institute.

Married to Martin Prager Mayer.

• Vice-Chair, Center for Economic and Social Rights