Rodrigo Valdés, a national of Chile, is director of the Western Hemisphere Department since May 2023. Prior to this, Rodrigo was a professor of economics in the School of Government at the Catholic University of Chile. He also held the position of Chile's Minister of Finance from 2015 to 2017. He spent several years in Chile's public sector serving in various leading positions both at the Ministry of Finance and the Central Bank, where he was Director of Research and Chief Economist responsible for producing the Bank's Monetary Policy Report and overseeing macroeconomic analysis. At the IMF, he also was a deputy director of the IMF European and WHD departments.

Rodrigo also has had experience in the banking sector. At BTG Pactual, he headed the macroeconomic research team for Latin America excluding Brazil, and he was Board and Executive Committee President at Banco Estado, Chile's sole state-owned bank. He also worked at Barclays Capital in New York as Director and Chief Economist for Latin America.

Rodrigo holds a PhD in Economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a bachelor's degree in Economics from the University of Chile. He has several publications on macroeconomics and international finance.