Boyd Center’s Celeste Carruthers Promoted to Associate Director
Boyd Center for Business & Economic Research - Staff
For more than a decade, Celeste Carruthers has helped shape education policy through research that reaches far beyond her faculty home at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, Haslam College of Business. Now, she is taking on the role of associate director at Haslam’s Boyd Center for Business and Economic Research.
Carruthers, the William F. Fox Distinguished Professor of Labor Economics, was promoted to associate director effective May 2026. Since joining Haslam’s Department of Economics in 2009 and the Boyd Center in 2011, she has built an international reputation for research that informs education policy and improves decision-making, according to Don Bruce, the Boyd Center director and Boyd Distinguished Professor.
“Since her arrival in the Boyd Center, Celeste has built a well-deserved reputation as a thought leader in higher education policy and economics,” says Bruce. “She is a world-class researcher, and now we are truly fortunate that she has agreed to lend her organizational and leadership skills in this expanded role.”
Carruthers’ academic research, which demonstrates the Boyd Center’s mission in action, has largely focused on education policy with crossovers into public economics, labor economics and economic history. She led research on the impacts of Knox County’s free community college program, Knox Achieves, and its statewide expansion, tnAchieves. As states began adopting their own free community college programs, federal and state policymakers across the country used Carruthers’ Boyd Center research to develop similar programs. Carruthers has also researched the consequences of segregated schools in the early 20th-century United States, as well as modern career and technical education.
“The best part about research is seeing people use our work to make better decisions,” says Carruthers. “That is the Boyd Center’s mission, and I am delighted to step into this role and help create those connections.”
As associate director, Carruthers will work to identify new research opportunities for the center, shepherding the process from start to finish, from advising on proposal development and assembling teams to managing timelines and disseminating impactful research findings.
According to Kira Rasmussen, the Boyd Center’s assistant director, Carruthers will transform the center’s research.
“The Boyd Center’s research projects and their sponsors will greatly benefit from Celeste’s ability to streamline processes, add informed insight and ensure quality research,” says Rasmussen. “She is a true asset to the center’s work.”
Carruthers’ leadership extends beyond the Boyd Center and UT. She was named editor-in-chief of Economics of Education Review in 2020, where she screens new submissions, manages a team of co-editors and associate editors and coordinates special issues and reports to the journal’s publisher. She also serves as a board member for the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management and AEFP Live Handbook. Additionally, Carruthers is a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research and serves as executive director of the upcoming Research Data Center at UT.
As she takes on the associate director role with the Boyd Center, Carruthers will lean on her proven ability to connect research and scholarship with real-world impact, strengthening the center’s mission to deliver research that serves Tennessee and beyond.