LaChaun Banks is a research fellow at the Kenan Institute, working specifically on the drivers of place-based economic growth as part of the American Growth Project initiative. This includes helping to expand the institute’s outreach and visibility with public officials, corporate partners and other stakeholders in major metropolitan areas around the country.

She also serves as a professor of the practice in the strategy and entrepreneurship area at UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School, where she is an applied economic development scholar focused on how capital flows, industrial policy, and institutional design shape regional opportunity and inequality. Her work bridges economic theory and on-the-ground implementation, examining how investments translate – or fail to translate – into durable local capacity. She specialized in place-based development, with particular attention to how financial actors, public policy, and local governance structures interact to produce divergent economic outcomes.

Before this role, LaChaun worked at Harvard University’s Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation, and the Bloomberg Harvard City Leadership Initiative where she managed the deployment and adoption of the newly launched City Leader Guide for Equitable Economic Development with mayors across the country and internationally.

LaChaun earned a B.A. in international studies from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, with a concentration in global economics, trade and development. She later earned an MBA from UNC Kenan-Flagler and an MPA from Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government. LaChaun has a certificate in Management, Leadership, and Decision Sciences from Harvard Kennedy School. In addition, LaChaun studied at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, studying Asian business and management, and Chinese government and politics.