Carol Graham is Leo Pasvolsky Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution, a College Park Professor at the University of Maryland, and a Senior Scientist at Gallup.

She served on a National Academy of Sciences panel on well-being metrics for policy in 2012-13, a Pioneer Award from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation in 2017, and a Lifetime Distinguished Scholar award from the International Society of Quality of Life Studies in 2018. From 2002-2004, she served as a Vice President at Brookings. She has also served as Special Advisor to the Vice President of the Inter-American Development Bank, as a Visiting Fellow in the Office of the Chief Economist of the World Bank, and as a consultant to the International Monetary Fund and the Harvard Institute for International Development.

She is the author of numerous books and articles. Her most recent books are: Happiness for All? Unequal Lives and Hopes in the Land of the Dream (Princeton, 2012); The Pursuit of Happiness: Toward an Economy of Well-Being (Brookings, 2011), also published in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean; and Happiness around the World: the Paradox of Happy Peasants and Miserable Millionaires (Oxford University Press, 2010), also published in Chinese and Portuguese.

She has published articles in a range of journals including Science, the Journal of Population Economics, Perspectives on Psychological Science, World Bank Research Observer; Health Affairs, Health Economics, the Journal of Socio-Economics; the Journal of Development Studies; the Journal of Human Development; and the Journal of Economic Literature; and her work has been reviewed in Science, the New Yorker, the Financial Times, and the New York Review of Books, among others. She is senior editor at Behavioral Science and Policy and an Associate Editor at the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization.

She has an A.B. from Princeton University, an M.A. from Johns Hopkins, a D.Phil from Oxford University, and is the mother of three children.