[2] An authority on international economics, especially the Russian economy, she has been involved in advising policymakers from the Obama Administration to the Nigerian and Rwandan governments.

[5] On January 14, 2022, President Joe Biden nominated Cook to serve as Federal Reserve governor;[6] she was confirmed by the U.S. Senate on May 10, and took office on May 23, 2022.

[10] She read for a BA in Physics and Philosophy (magna cum laude) from Spelman College in 1986, where she was named a Harry S. Truman Scholar.

She proceeded to St Hilda's College, Oxford as Spelman's first Marshall Scholar where she earned another BA in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics in 1988.

[9] Cook earned a PhD in Economics from the University of California, Berkeley in 1997 under the guidance of Barry Eichengreen and David Romer.

From 2000 to 2001, she was a senior adviser on finance and development at the U.S. Treasury Department as a Council on Foreign Relations International Affairs Fellow.

[3] Her research suggested that violence against African-Americans under the Jim Crow laws led to a lower than expected number of actual patents filed; however, a recent review of this research has revealed that the apparent drop in patents was merely an accounting error on her part, having failed to recognize that the source database no longer tracked the data in question.

[16] In 2021, Senator Sherrod Brown reportedly pushed the Biden Administration to nominate Cook to serve on the Federal Reserve Board of Governors.