’I learned what the good life meant’

Appointed as U.S. President Joe Biden's "special assistant" on manufacturing and economic development, UdeM alumnus Elisabeth Reynolds reflects on what her experience here taught her. Elisabeth Reynolds begins with an apology. "I'm sorry I've had to reschedule, but it's just a whole new world here," the American academic says from Washington, D.C., several months into her new job advising U.S. President Joe Biden on economic policy. "I don't control my own schedule anymore, and I find that very disconcerting." Appointed early last March as Biden's special assistant on manufacturing and economic development at the National Economic Council , Reynolds had agreed to 20 minutes to talk about her life and work. She'd come to Washington from academia. Since 2000 she'd been principal research scientist and head of the Industrial Performance Center at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology , and a lecturer at MIT's urban-studies and planning department. Now she was happy to reminisce about a different, earlier time in her life, one she remembers particularly fondly: the years she spent in Montreal in the mid-1990s, doing her master's in economics at Université de Montréal.