Rebecca Blank

Rebecca Margaret Blank (September 19, 1955 – February 17, 2023) was an American economist and academic administrator. She was the ninth chancellor of the University of Wisconsin–Madison from 2013 to 2022. She served in several senior roles in the United States Department of Commerce during the presidency of Barack Obama, including more than a year as acting United States Secretary of Commerce.

Blank was born on September 19, 1955, in Columbia, Missouri, and grew up in Roseville, Minnesota. She graduated summa cum laude from the University of Minnesota with a degree in economics and earned a Ph.D. in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Blank married Hanns Kuttner in 1994, and they had a daughter.

In 2022, Blank fell ill while vacationing in Europe, and was subsequently diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. She died at a hospice facility in Fitchburg, Wisconsin, on February 17, 2023, at the age of 67.

Blank was the Robert S. Kerr Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution and Dean of the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan. From 1997 to 1999, Blank was a member of Council of Economic Advisers in the 1990s during the Clinton Administration, participating in White House decision-making on economic, social, and regulatory policy issues.

Blank was a professor of economics at Northwestern University and director of the University of Chicago–Northwestern University Joint Center for Poverty Research. She also taught at Princeton University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

During the Obama Administration, Blank joined the U.S. Commerce Department in June 2009 as Secretary Gary Locke's principal economic advisor in her role as Under Secretary for Economic Affairs and head of the Economics and Statistics Administration (ESA). ESA oversees the two premier statistical agencies in the United States: the Census Bureau and the Bureau of Economic Analysis. She also served as Locke's appointed Board Representative to the Pension Benefit Guarantee Corporation.

During her service at ESA, Blank played an important role in overseeing a decennial Census operation that was both timely and under budget – netting $1.6 billion in 2010 savings. Within ESA, she supervised a staff of economists and policy analysts who produced various reports and forecasts that helped develop and assess domestic and international policy.