Catherine Ruth Pakaluk is Executive Director of The James Cardinal Gibbons Institute for Human Ecology, a Senior Fellow with the Gibbons Institute, and associate professor of economics at The Busch School of Business. She is author of the widely acclaimed ethnography Hannah’s Children: The Women Quietly Defying the Birth Dearth (Regnery, 2024), a multidisciplinary account of American women choosing to have large families against the global trend to sub-replacement fertility.

Her work has been reviewed or covered in The New Yorker, Slate, The Atlantic, The Times (of London), The Wall Street Journal, Freakonomics Radio, NPR, Fox News, and more. Pakaluk received the 2015 Acton Institute’s Novak Award, a 2023 Freedom and Opportunity Academic Prize from The Heritage Foundation. She earned a doctorate in economics at Harvard University, where she studied with Nobel Laureate Oliver Hart. She is married to American philosopher Michael Pakaluk with whom she raised fourteen children: six from Michael’s previous marriage to pro-life activist Ruth VK Pakaluk, deceased in 1998, and eight from their marriage in 1999.