Dr. Dawn Carpenter is an applied financial ethicist, award-winning multimedia storyteller, and thought leader working at the intersection of healthspan, wealthspan, and human flourishing. She serves as Director of Financial Longevity at the Milken Institute Center for the Future of Aging, where she leads research and strategic initiatives focused on the economic and ethical implications of longer lives. Her work bridges finance, healthcare, labor, and ethics through a systems-based framework she calls “financial longevity,” exploring how institutions can better support dignity, contribution, and wellbeing across the lifespan.
Dr. Carpenter is the author of the Milken Institute publications The Longevity Equation: How Healthspan and Wealthspan Intersect and Financial Longevity: Redesigning Economic Architecture for Longer Lives. She is also the author of the Substack publication The Financial Ethicist, which explores the moral architecture of work, capital, aging, and economic life through essays that blend ethics, policy, finance, and culture.
Before entering academia and policy, Dr. Carpenter spent more than 25 years in finance, advising and underwriting more than $3 billion in transactions for social purpose corporations and mission-driven enterprises. She earned her doctorate from Georgetown University and received the university’s Spirit of Georgetown Award for leadership and service. She also serves as a senior advisor to Vatican initiatives focused on solidarity economy principles and the intersection of faith, finance, and human dignity.
An internationally recognized speaker, Dr. Carpenter is the creator and host of the award-winning podcast What Does It Profit? and an award-winning documentary filmmaker. Across her writing, films, research, and public speaking, she examines how economic systems shape human flourishing, community, and the meaning of contribution in modern life.
