Board of directors · Portland
Dr. Anita Sharma
Director
“If you want a bank to treat customers well, pay its leaders for treating customers well. It's not complicated.”
Professor of economics at Reed College and former Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco economist. Chairs the board's compensation and governance committee.
- [email protected]
- Phone
- +1 (503) 555-0175
- Office
- Portland branch
- With Meridian since
- 2019
The story
Anita grew up in Edison, New Jersey, the daughter of two engineers who had emigrated from Delhi, and was the first person in her family to study anything other than engineering. She credits a summer internship at a credit union in Newark, at eighteen, with teaching her that economics is about people making decisions under pressure, not equations.
After a doctorate at MIT she spent nine years at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, where she worked on community-bank supervision and wrote research on small-business credit access that is still assigned in graduate courses. She moved to Reed College in 2012 to teach, and has been a full professor since 2018.
She joined Meridian Trust's board in 2019 and chairs the compensation and governance committee. Her most visible contribution is the bank's executive-pay structure, which she redesigned in 2020 to tie half of leadership bonuses to customer-satisfaction and complaint-resolution metrics rather than profit alone. She presented the model at a Federal Reserve community-banking conference, and it has been adopted by several other banks.
She lives in Southeast Portland with her husband Raj, a software engineer, and their daughter Maya, fourteen. She is a volunteer tutor with Portland's Schoolhouse Supplies and serves on the board of the Oregon Humanities council.
Off duty
When not at the bank
Hiking the Oregon Coast Trail
She is walking all 382 miles in sections and has finished 290. She keeps a journal of each segment and insists on the long way around every headland.
Hindustani classical singing
She studies khayal with a teacher in Beaverton and has performed twice at the Rasika music society. Her daughter describes the practice sessions as 'loud but impressive.'
Baking for her students
Every exam week she brings a tray of her mother's besan ladoo to class. Attendance at the review session has, she notes, risen measurably since she started.
Ask me about
Education
- B.A. Economics, Rutgers University, 1997
- Ph.D. Economics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2003
