Dr. Cathy Carey is the Dean of the Romain College of Business and Professor of Economics at the University of Southern Indiana (USI), a position she has held since 2019. Prior to her current position at USI, Dr. Carey served as the interim dean of the Gordon Ford College of Business at Western Kentucky University (WKU). She joined the WKU faculty in 1992 as assistant professor of economics, was promoted to associate professor in 1998 and professor in 2008, and served as chair of the WKU Department of Economics from 2012 to 2018. Additionally, Dr. Carey served as the Director of the WKU Center for Applied Economics, held the Dugas Family Professorship, and worked in consulting and economic development. She has also been the recipient of multiple grants and awards for her leadership, research and expertise.
As an economist, Dr. Carey has been published in multiple peer-reviewed academic journals, and she has made numerous presentations to local and regional organizations. She received three degrees from the University of Kentucky, which includes a bachelor’s in business and economics, a master’s in economics, and a Ph.D. in economics, with fields in monetary and international economics. In addition, she has an interest in agribusiness, having grown up on a farm in central Kentucky.
Dr. Carey served as program chair and president of the Kentucky Economic Association (KEA), which identifies and studies the economic problems in the Commonwealth of Kentucky and stimulates closer ties among economists in government, business, labor, and education. She also served as an ex officio member of the KEA Board of Directors for 12 years, and she was the editor of the Journal of Applied Economics and Policy for five years. Dr. Carey currently serves on Kentucky’s Consensus Forecasting Group, which is a non-partisan team of seven economists from across Kentucky that develops projections used for state budget development and long-range planning