Janet L. Yellen has spent her career shaping the economic course of the United States and the world. She served as U.S. Secretary of the Treasury, Chair of the Federal Reserve, and Chair of the White House Council of Economic Advisers—the only person to lead all three. As Treasury Secretary from 2021 to 2025, she guided the nation through complex financial challenges. Today, she is a Distinguished Fellow in Residence at the Hutchins Center on Fiscal and Monetary Policy at the Brookings Institution.
Her Federal Reserve leadership is historic: she was Chair from 2014 to 2018, Vice Chair from 2010 to 2014, and president and CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco from 2004 to 2010. She also chaired the Council of Economic Advisers under President Clinton and served on the Fed Board in the 1990s.
Yellen began her career in academia, teaching at Harvard and the London School of Economics before joining the University of California, Berkeley, as Eugene E. and Catherine M. Trefethen Professor of Business and Professor of Economics.
She graduated from Brown University in 1967 and earned her PhD from Yale in 1971. She has received numerous honorary degrees, is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Council on Foreign Relations, and served as President of the American Economic Association and Western Economic Association. As a respected scholar, Yellen’s work has left a lasting mark on macroeconomics and labor economics, shaping policy and guiding economic thought worldwide.
