American economist, Janet Yellen, has served as the 78th United States Secretary of the Treasury since January 2021. Notably, she is the first female to hold this post. Prior to this role, she also shattered glass ceilings when she became the first female to serve as the chair of the Federal Reserve, a position she held from 2014 to 2018. Yellen has also led the White House Council of Economic Advisers under the Clinton administration.
Yellen was born in 1946 and raised in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. She initially intended to study philosophy upon enrolling at Pembroke College in Brown University but changed her major to economics, partly due to the influence of professors George Herbert Borts and Herschel Grossman.
Yellen went on to graduate summa cum laude and then earned her doctorate in economics from Yale University in 1971. She then served as an assistant professor of economics at Harvard University until 1976 as one of only two women faculty in Harvard's economics department. In 1977, after failing to secure tenure, she took a job with the Federal Reserve's Board of Governors.
From 1978 to 1980, Yellen served as a lecturer at the London School of Economics and Political Science. She then spent more than 20 years at the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley, where she conducted research and taught macroeconomics at all levels, receiving several teaching awards. She took a leave of absence in 1994 to serve as a member of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, a post she held until 1997. She left to become head of President Bill Clinton’s Council of Economic Advisers and stayed there until 1999.
Yellen returned to Berkely in 1999 and taught until 2004, when she was appointed president of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco. She was made vice chair of the Board of Governors of the Fed in 2010 and three years later President Barack Obama nominated her as the next head of the Federal Reserve System. She has received a number of academic honors during her career, including the Wilbur Cross Medal from Yale in 1997, an honorary doctor of laws degree from Brown in 1998, and an honorary doctor of humane letters from Bard College in 2000.