Janet Yellen

Her father was Julius Yellen (1906–1975), a family physician who worked from the ground floor of their house.

Her mother was Anna Ruth (née Blumenthal; 1907–1986), an elementary school teacher who gave up her teaching job to become a stay-at-home mother.

Janet has an older brother, John (born 1942), who is a program director for archaeology at the National Science Foundation.

In a speech at the Polin Museum of the History of Polish Jews, Yellen said that her father's family immigrated to the United States from Sokołów Podlaski, a small town about 50 miles outside of Warsaw.

She shared that nearly the entirety of its Jewish population, including many of her relatives, was deported or murdered during the Holocaust.

Yellen attended the local Fort Hamilton High School, where she was an honor society member and participated in the booster club, the psychology club, and the history club.

She also served as editor-in-chief of The Pilot, the school newspaper, which continued its 13-year streak as the first-place winner of the prestigious Columbia Scholastic Press Association contest under her leadership.

She earned a National Merit commendation letter and was admitted to a selective science honors program at Columbia University to voluntarily study mathematics on Saturday mornings.

Yellen was one of 30 students to win state Regents scholarships for college and one of a select few to win the mayor's citation for a scholarship.

Janet Louise Yellen (born August 13, 1946) is an American economist serving as the 78th United States secretary of the treasury since January 26, 2021.

Yellen was born on August 13, 1946, to a family of Polish Jewish ancestry in the Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, neighborhood of New York City, and grew up there.

She graduated in 1963 as the valedictorian of her class.

In line with school tradition, for the editor to interview the valedictorian, she interviewed herself in the third person.

Yellen enrolled at Pembroke College in Brown University, initially intending to study philosophy.

During her freshman year, she switched her planned major to economics and was particularly influenced by professors George Herbert Borts and Herschel Grossman.

In the spring of 1964, she also joined the business staff of The Brown Daily Herald, but soon afterward she left the paper to focus on her academic studies.

Born and raised in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, Yellen graduated from Brown University in 1967 and earned a Ph.D. in economics from Yale University in 1971.

Yellen graduated summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa with a bachelor's in economics from Brown University in 1967, and earned her master's and PhD in economics from Yale University in 1971.

Her dissertation was titled Employment, Output and Capital Accumulation in an Open Economy: A Disequilibrium Approach under the supervision of James Tobin, a noted economist who would later receive the Nobel Memorial Prize.

As a teaching assistant, Yellen was so meticulous in her note-taking during Tobin's macroeconomics class that her notes became the unofficial textbook and were referred to as "Yellen Notes" while being circulated among generations of graduate students.

Her former professor and Nobel Prize in Economics laureate, Joseph Stiglitz, has called her one of his brightest and most memorable students.

She later described Yale professors Tobin and William Brainard as "lifelong mentors" who laid the intellectual groundwork for her economic views.

She taught as an assistant professor at Harvard University from 1971 to 1976, was a staff economist for the Federal Reserve Board from 1977 to 1978, and was a faculty member at the London School of Economics from 1978 to 1980.

Yellen was the only woman among the two dozen economists who earned their doctorates from Yale in 1971.

After receiving her Ph.D., Yellen obtained the position of assistant professor of economics at Harvard University, where she taught from 1971 to 1976.

At that time, she was one of only two female faculty members in Harvard's economics department; the other woman was Rachel McCulloch.

The pair struck up a close friendship and went on to write several academic papers together.

In 1977, Yellen took a job within the Federal Reserve's Board of Governors after failing to win tenure at Harvard; she was recruited as a staff economist for the Board of Governors by Edwin M. Truman, who had known her from Yale.

Truman was a junior professor when he heard Yellen's oral exam and was then about to take over the Fed's Division of International Finance.

She was assigned to research international monetary reform.

While at the Fed, she met her husband, economist George Akerlof, in the bank's cafeteria; they married in 1978, less than a year later.

Yellen is professor emeritus at the Haas School of Business and the University of California, Berkeley, where she has been a faculty member since 1980 and became the Eugene E. and Catherine M. Trefethen Professor of Business Administration and Professor of Economics.

Yellen served as a member of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors from 1994 to 1997 and was nominated to the position by President Bill Clinton, who then named her chair of the Council of Economic Advisers from 1997 to 1999.

She subsequently returned to academia, before serving as president and chief executive officer of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco from 2004 until 2010.

Afterward, President Barack Obama chose her to replace Donald Kohn as vice chair of the Federal Reserve from 2010 to 2014 before nominating her to succeed Ben Bernanke as chair of the Federal Reserve three years later.

She was succeeded by Jerome Powell after President Donald Trump declined to renominate her for a second term.

She previously served as the 15th chair of the Federal Reserve from 2014 to 2018.

She is the first woman to hold either post, and has also led the White House Council of Economic Advisers.

Following her departure from the Federal Reserve, Yellen joined the Brookings Institution as a distinguished fellow in residence from 2018 until 2020, when she again went into public service.

On November 30, 2020, President-elect Joe Biden nominated Yellen to serve as secretary of the treasury; she was confirmed by the U.S. Senate on January 25, 2021, and took office the next day.