Dr. Mieke Meurs is Professor Emerita of Economics at American University in Washington, DC, where she served from 2018 to 2025 as Co-Director of the Program on Gender Analysis in Economics (PGAE). She holds a PhD in Economics from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and has more than three decades of experience in research, teaching, and academic leadership. She was named American University’s Scholar/Teacher of the Year in 2009, the university’s annual award recognizing exceptional achievement in both scholarship and teaching. She continues to supervise PhD students at American University. Her research encompasses feminist economics, care work, household decision-making, agrarian institutions, rural livelihoods, and economic transition, with extensive research and collaboration across the Global South and transition economies. She has published 2 books and numerous articles and book chapters.
Mieke has played a leading role in advancing feminist economics internationally. She has served in senior leadership positions in the International Association for Feminist Economics (IAFFE), including as Executive Vice President and Treasurer, and is a member of the editorial team of Feminist Economics. Through PGAE, she has helped build international research and training networks in gender economics, including programmes supporting over 30 international scholars from the Global South, many of whom have gone on to establish gender economics programmes and research initiatives in their home countries. She also serves as an Advisor to the Gender Economics Research Center at Narxoz University in Almaty, Kazakhstan, building on a longstanding collaboration in gender economics research and training in Central Asia. Her recent work includes research on care economies in countries including Brazil, Ghana, Kazakhstan, and Mongolia, and she co-edited a 2026 special section on care economies in the Global South. She has also brought her ideas to public audiences through her TEDx talk, The End of Homo Economicus.