Until October 2022, Ray served over 11 years at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, where he was the founding director of a research center focused on wealth inequality. Before moving to St. Louis in 2009, Ray was Vice President of New America, a DC-based think-tank, and prior to that worked in the U.S. Congress, Prosperity Now, the United Nations in Rome, and Ernst & Whinney (now EY). Ray also serves on many local and national boards.
In the fall of 2021, Ray published The Future of Building Wealth in partnership with the Aspen Institute and previously published The Next Progressive Era with Phillip Longman. He has written for the Washington Post, New York Times, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and Atlantic Monthly and has appeared on CBS Sunday Morning, NPR, Bloomberg, and CNN, among others. He has advised presidential candidates and every Administration since George W. Bush’s and has testified before the U.S. House and Senate several times.
Raised in Akron, Ohio, Ray is a first-gen graduate of The Ohio State University. He also holds master’s degrees from Yale Divinity School and the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard.