Who is Lisa Cook, the Fed governor the Supreme Court ruled can stay on the job?

Lisa Cook is an economist, a Georgia native and a Federal Reserve governor who made history as the first Black woman on the central bank’s board.

President Donald Trump, seeking a Fed more compliant to his economic policies, moved to fire Cook last year. He accused her of committing mortgage fraud, which she has denied.

Cook contested the president’s action, setting up a legal showdown that went to the U.S. Supreme Court. On Monday, the court in a 5-4 vote allowed Cook to stay in her job while she fights the Republican president’s effort to fire her.

As a Fed governor, Cook sits on the central bank’s powerful interest rate setting committee. The committee’s decisions affect the rate in which banks borrow from the central bank, a rate that influences interest rates on other types of debt, including mortgages, car loans and credit cards.

Here’s what to know about Lisa Cook:

Cook is a Georgia native

Cook grew up in Milledgeville, where her mother was a faculty member at the nursing department of Georgia College and State University and her father was a local chaplain.

She and her sisters were among the first Black students to desegregate the local schools, and she said in an October 2024 speech that experience gave her confidence in the “hope and promise of a world that could and would continually improve.”

Cook is a Spelman alumna who became a professor

She graduated from Spelman College as a physics and philosophy major, studied at the University of Oxford and later earned a doctoral degree at the University of California, Berkeley.

She has said summiting Mount Kilimanjaro with a British economist was her inspiration to go into the field.

According to her Fed bio, Cook was a professor of economics and international relations at Michigan State University before her appointment to the Fed Board of Governors. She also had previously served on the faculty at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government.

Government service

Cook served as a Treasury Department adviser during the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations. She also later worked in the White House under President Barack Obama.

Then-President Joe Biden nominated her to the Fed board in 2022. Her term runs until 2038.

Atlanta condo controversy

Last August, Trump moved to fire Cook. The effort came as the president seethed over the central bank’s refusal to lower interest rates.

It was the first time a president had ever sought to oust a sitting Fed governor.

The unproven allegations stemmed from statements by Bill Pulte, Trump’s director of the Federal Housing Finance Authority. He and Trump raised issues with three mortgages Cook took out for residences she owned in Michigan, Atlanta and Massachusetts that predated her tenure with the Fed.

Pulte and Trump said Cook claimed both a condo in Atlanta and a home in Michigan as her primary residence on mortgage applications. Pulte made two criminal referrals to the Justice Department related to Cook’s mortgages, according to CNBC. The second referenced the Massachusetts condo being listed in an April 2021 mortgage application as a second home rather than a rental property.

Cook disclosed earning rental income from the Massachusetts condo in her government ethics disclosures later that year.

Lenders sometimes offer lower interest rates for a primary residence rather than a second home or rental property. They have not produced documents to back up the allegation.

State property records show Cook has never claimed a homestead exemption on her Midtown Atlanta condo. In Fulton County, a homestead exemption is a form of tax relief for residents who own and occupy the home as their primary residence. Records also show she hasn’t missed a property tax payment.

But those records don’t include her mortgage application, which is not publicly available.

Cook has denied any wrongdoing and said she was staying in her post.

“I will not resign,” she said in a statement through her attorney last year. “I will continue to carry out my duties to help the American economy as I have been doing since 2022.”

What happens now?

Cook can continue in her post at least as long as her lawsuit challenging her firing goes on, the court said. The Trump administration is appealing a lower court ruling in her favor.