Alicia H. Munnell, one of the most well-known retirement experts in the United States, will be a keynote speaker at the 2nd Annual Invest In Women conference, sponsored by Financial Advisor and Private Wealth magazines.

Munnell, who also will be speaking at FA & PW's 7th annual Inside Retirement conference, is the director of the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College and a professor at the college's Carroll School of Management.

Her most recent book, coauthored with Charles D. Ellis and Andrew D. Eschtruth, is Falling Short: The Coming Retirement Crisis and What To Do About It. She frequently is quoted in the The New York Times, LA Times, Bloomberg, Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe and other leading publications around the country.

In her role at Boston College, Munnell is involved in research on issues that are important to financial advisors and their clients. An August 2015 working paper she coauthored looks at retirement gaps: the optimal ages to which people in four socioeconomic groups would need to work to maintain their pre-retirement standard of living versus their planned retirement ages. The paper also looks at whether these gaps come from poor circumstances or poor planning.

Her current research projects include looking at why workers retire before they plan, whether households increase their savings when their kids leave home, and the impact of Massachusetts health insurance reform on labor mobility and retirement.

Previously, Munnell was a member of the President's Council of Economic Advisers and assistant secretary of the Treasury for economic policy. She also worked for 20 years for the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, where she became a senior vice president and director of research.