Rosie Rios Biography

Rosie Rios is the CEO of Red River Associates, a real estate consulting firm and is finalizing her term as a Visiting Scholar at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. She was the 43rd Treasurer of the United States and is most recently known for leading the efforts to place a portrait of a woman on the front of U.S. currency for the first time in over a century. Upon her resignation in 2016, she received the Hamilton Award, the highest honor bestowed in the U.S. Department of the Treasury. Rosie was the longest serving Senate-confirmed Treasury official beginning with her time on the Treasury/Federal Reserve Transition Team in November 2008 at the height of the financial crisis.

In her role as Treasurer of the United States, Rosie was the CEO of the Bureau of Engraving and Printing and the U.S. Mint, including Fort Knox. Her day-to-day responsibilities included overseeing all currency and coin production activities with almost 4,000-employees in eight facilities nationwide and an annual budget of approximately $5 billion. In the first five years of her tenure, she saved over $1 billion by implementing efficiencies and innovative concepts while meeting increased production demand and increasing employee morale at record levels. Her signature currently appears on a world-record $1.4 trillion out of the $1.5 trillion in circulation worldwide.

Rosie’s entire career has focused on real estate finance, economic development and urban revitalization in both the public and private sectors. Prior to her presidential appointment in Treasury, Rosie was Managing Director of Investments for MacFarlane Partners, a $22 billion real estate investment management firm based in San Francisco. In this capacity, she was responsible for several of MacFarlane Partners’ urban investment activities including sourcing, underwriting and structuring prospective investments and all relevant due diligence as well as overseeing projects during their development and stabilization. Other real estate/urban revitalization activities include the Director of Economic Development and/or Redevelopment for multiple cities such as Oakland, Fremont, San Leandro and Union City. She also consulted with the City of San Francisco Public Utility Commission and reported to the Assistant General Manager for Infrastructure on one of the nation’s largest capital improvement programs. She also served as a strategic advisor on behalf of the Washington D.C. City Administrator for the redevelopment of the Anacostia Waterfront. Her first job out of college was as a Commercial Property Underwriter for General Reinsurance Corporation.

Rosie is a graduate of Harvard University and was selected as the first Latina in Harvard’s 382-year history to have a portrait commissioned in her honor. She currently serves on the board of Fidelity Charitable Trust, the Schlesinger Council at Harvard and the Advisory Committee for Artemis Real Estate Partners. She was previously a Trustee with the Alameda County Employees Retirement Association (ACERA). In 2018, she was appointed as a member of USA 250, a Congressional Commission to commemorate the 250th anniversary of the nation’s founding in 2026. Her personal passion includes EMPOWERMENT 2020, an initiative that facilitates the physical recognition of historical American women. Its first project, Teachers Righting History, recognizes historical American women in classrooms across the country. In September of 2018, she launched Notable Women, an Augmented Reality educational initiative in collaboration with Google, https://youtu.be/1peWF8ThC8Y. She remains active in real estate finance and is consulting on several transformational projects in the Bay Area under her “RESCUE” initiative: Real Estate for Socially Conscious Urban Empowerment.