Dr. Dawn Carpenter

Dr. Dawn M. Carpenter is the Director of Financial Longevity at the Milken Institute’s Center for the Future of Aging, where she leads work at the intersection of financial security, work, health, and longevity.

Her research examines how institutions, employers, markets, and public policy can better support people through increasingly long and complex life courses.

A financial ethicist by training, Carpenter is also a Practitioner Fellow at Georgetown University, where she previously founded and directed the Solidarity Economy Workshop. Her work explores questions of contributive justice, economic participation, and the ethical design of systems that shape opportunity and well-being.

Before entering academia and public policy, Carpenter spent nearly three decades in social-purpose investment banking, helping to structure approximately $3 billion in financing for mission-driven organizations and public institutions.

She is also an award-winning documentary filmmaker and the host of the podcast What Does It Profit?, which examines the moral dimensions of business, finance, and economic life.

Her recent work focuses on the relationship between health span and wealth span, the economic consequences of longevity, and the systems needed to help people live longer with greater financial resilience, purpose, and agency.