She will be only the fourth black person on the Board ever. She is taking Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen's vacant seat.
There isn't a whole lot of racial or gender diversity in the Federal Reserve or the economics profession for that matter. Racial discrimination and sexism in economics are significant problems.
She's an impressive person. As a child, she was assaulted desegregating schools in Georgia. Her economics doctoral advisors were Barry Eichengreen and David Romer. She did her dissertation on the banking system in Russia. She also has worked on a database of lynchings in the United States.
One of her economics papers is on patents among African Americans post Civil War. She finds that segregation laws, lynchings, race riots, and other racial violence suppressed patent rates (proxy for research and development) among black people. Before the rise of this violence, the patent rates between black people and white people were similar. By her analysis, this violence and the resulting perception that patent rights wouldn't be protected lowered African American patents by about 1,100 from 1870 to 1940.