Stanley Fischer has been Governor of the Bank of Israel since May 2005. Prior to joining the Bank of Israel, Prof. Fischer was Vice Chairman of Citigroup from February 2002 through April 2005, where he was also Head of the Public Sector Group from February 2004 to April 2005, Chairman of the Country Risk Committee, and President of Citigroup International.

Prof. Fischer was the First Deputy Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund, from September 1994 until the end of August 2001. Before he joined the IMF, Prof. Fischer was the Killian Professor and Head of the Department of Economics at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology). From January 1988 to August 1990 he was Vice President, Development Economics and Chief Economist at the World Bank.

Prof. Fischer was born in Zambia in 1943. He took the B.Sc (Econ) and M.Sc. (Econ) at the London School of Economics from 1962-66, and obtained his Ph.D. in economics at MIT in 1969. He was Assistant Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago until 1973, when he returned to the MIT Department of Economics as an Associate Professor. He became Professor of Economics in 1977. He has held visiting positions at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem, and at the Hoover Institution at Stanford.

Prof. Fischer is the author of Macroeconomics (with Rudi Dornbusch and Richard Startz, 9th edition, 2004). He is also the author of Lectures in Macroeconomics (MIT Press, 1989, with Olivier Blanchard), Economics (second edition, McGraw Hill, 1988, with Rudiger Dornbusch and Richard Schmalensee), IMF Essays From a Time of Crisis (MIT Press, 2004) and Indexing, Inflation, and Economic Policy (MIT Press, 1986) and the editor of other books, among them Securing Peace in the Middle East (MIT Press, 1994).

From 1986 to 1994 he was editor of the NBER Macroeconomics Annual; he has also served as Associate Editor of other economics journals. He has published extensively in the professional journals.

Prof. Fischer is a Fellow of the Econometric Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, the G-30, and the Trilateral Commission, a Guggenheim Fellow, and a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research.

He has served on the Boards of the Institute for International Economics, Women's World Banking and the International Crisis Group, as well as the International Advisory Board of the New Economic School, Moscow.