Marianne Wanamaker is a professor of economics and executive director of the Howard H. Baker Jr. Center for Public Policy at the University of Tennessee. She is a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, and a research fellow at the Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) and at the University of Stellenbosch, South Africa. Dr. Wanamaker is the former chief domestic economist at the White House Council of Economic Advisors, where she also served as the senior labor economist. She is a former member of the Federal Workforce Policy Advisory Board (discussion here.) and a former associate consultant for Bain & Company in Boston, Massachusetts where she worked on the healthcare and retail teams.

Dr. Wanamaker serves on the board of Zoo Knoxville and at ThinkWhy, a Dallas-based labor market data startup. She is a director of 3 Roots Capital, a certified CDFI, and is an economic advisor to the Economic Innovation Group, a Washington, DC think tank.

In addition to her research record, Dr. Wanamaker has been the recipient of several college and university-level teaching awards, including UT's Alexander Prize in 2019. In 2017, she was named to Poets and Quants Top 40 Undergraduate Professors.

Dr. Wanamaker is a 2001 summa cum laude graduate of Vanderbilt University, where she was a member of Phi Beta Kappa. She completed her doctoral work at Northwestern University in 2009 and has been on faculty at the University of Tennessee ever since.