Christopher J. Waller
Member of the Board of Governors
From the Board's official biography
Listed by the Board as: Christopher J. Waller
Christopher J. Waller took office as a member of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System on December 18, 2020, to fill an unexpired term ending January 31, 2030.
Christopher J. Waller took office as a member of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System on December 18, 2020, to fill an unexpired term ending January 31, 2030.
Prior to his appointment at the Board, Dr. Waller served as executive vice president and director of research at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis since 2009.
In addition to his experience in the Federal Reserve System, Dr. Waller served as a professor and the Gilbert F. Schaefer Chair of Economics at the University of Notre Dame. He was also a research fellow with Notre Dame's Kellogg Institute for International Studies. From 1998 to 2003, Dr. Waller was a professor and the Carol Martin Gatton Chair of Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics at the University of Kentucky. During that time, he was also a research fellow at the Center for European Integration Studies at the University of Bonn. From 1992 to 1994, he served as the director of graduate studies at Indiana University's Department of Economics, where he also served as associate professor and an assistant professor.
Dr. Waller received a BS in economics from Bemidji State University and an MA and PhD from Washington State University.
Quoted verbatim from the Board of Governors' biography of Christopher J. Waller, a U.S. Government work in the public domain. Retrieved Sep 2, 2026, 2:26 a.m. ET. Nothing above is written by this site.
What a governor does
The Board of Governors has seven seats. Every governor is a permanent voting member of the Federal Open Market Committee, which sets the target range for the federal funds rate, and shares in the Board's other work: supervising the largest banks, setting reserve requirements and the discount rate, and overseeing the twelve regional Reserve Banks.
A full term is fourteen years, and the terms are staggered so that one expires every two years. The length is deliberate. It is meant to outlast any single President, so that a governor's decisions are not made with the next election in mind. A governor appointed to fill an unexpired term can be reappointed to a full one; a governor who has served a full term cannot.
How the Chair is chosen
The Chair and the two Vice Chairs are governors first. They are designated to those roles by the President from among the sitting governors, for four-year terms, and each designation is confirmed separately by the Senate. A Chair whose four-year designation ends can remain on the Board as a governor for the rest of their fourteen-year term.
The Chair presides over the Board and the FOMC, testifies to Congress twice a year, and gives the press conference after each meeting. On the Committee itself, the Chair holds one vote of twelve.
Where this fits
The full current roster, the twelve districts and the plain-language primer are on What is the Federal Reserve?. The meeting schedule is on the FOMC calendar.