Marcus Noland, vice president and senior fellow, has been associated with the Peterson Institute since 1985. He was educated at Swarthmore College (BA) and the Johns Hopkins University (PhD). He was a Senior Economist at the Council of Economic Advisers in the Executive Office of the President of the United States. He has held research or teaching positions at Yale University, the Johns Hopkins University, the University of Southern California, Tokyo University, Saitama University (now the National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies), the University of Ghana, the Korea Development Institute, and the East-West Center.

He won the 2000 Ohira Memorial Award for his book Avoiding the Apocalypse: The Future of the Two Koreas. Noland is the author of Korea after Kim Jong-il (2004), Avoiding the Apocalypse: The Future of the Two Koreas (2000), Famine in North Korea: Markets, Aid, and Reform (Columbia University Press, 2007), and numerous other books on Asian economic issues; and editor of Economic Integration of the Korean Peninsula (1998). He has served as an occasional consultant to organizations, such as the World Bank and the National Intelligence Council, and has testified before the US Congress on numerous occasions.