Henry Aaron is currently Bruce and Virginia MacLaury Senior Fellow in the Economic Studies Program at the Brookings Institution. From 1990 through 1996 he was the Director of the Economic Studies Program.  He is vice chair of the District of Columbia Health Benefit Exchange Authority and is chair of the Social Security Advisory Board.

He is a graduate of UCLA and holds a PhD in economics from Harvard University.  He taught at the University of Maryland from 1967 through 1989, except for 1977 and 1978 when he served as Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation at the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. He chaired the 1979 Advisory Council on Social Security. During the academic year 1996-97 he was a Guggenheim Fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University.

He is a member of the Institute of Medicine, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the advisory committee of the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, and the board directors of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.  He has been a member of the boards of directors of the College Retirement Equity Fund and Georgetown University.  He has been a member of the visiting committee of the Harvard Medical and Dental Schools and of the Harvard Department of Economics.  He was a member of the board of directors of Abt Associates; a founding member, vice-president, and chair of the board of the National Academy of Social Insurance; vice-president and member of the executive committee of the American Economic Association; and president of the Association of Public Policy and Management.