Tara Sinclair earned a B.A. in Foreign Languages from Wheaton College in Wheaton, Illinois, and an M.A. and Ph.D. in Economics from Washington University in St. Louis. Before starting graduate school, she worked as a commercial real estate appraiser in Chicago. She was also a visiting scholar at the St. Louis Federal Reserve.

Her research interests focus on modeling, explaining, and forecasting business cycle fluctuations and economic growth for different countries. Her publications include: "The Relationships between Permanent and Transitory Movements in U.S. Output and the Unemployment Rate," in the Journal of Money, Credit, and Banking, "Asymmetry in the Business Cycle: Friedman's Plucking Model with Correlated Innovations," in Studies in Nonlinear Dynamics & Econometrics, "Output Fluctuations in the G-7: An Unobserved Components Approach" with Sinchan Mitra in Macroeconomic Dynamics, and "Can the Fed Predict the State of the Economy?" with Fred Joutz and H.O. Stekler in Economics Letters. She is director of the H. O. Stekler Research Program on Forecasting and a senior fellow with the Indeed Hiring Lab. She teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in macroeconomics and econometrics.