Janet L. Yellen

78th Secretary

United States Treasury

Janet L. Yellen served as the 78th Secretary of the United States Treasury from 2021 through 2025. Previously, she was a Distinguished Fellow in Residence with the Economic Studies Program at the Brookings Institution and former chair of the Federal Reserve Board. Yellen also served as vice chair of the Federal Reserve Board, president and chief executive officer of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, as well as chair of the White House Council of Economic Advisers. Yellen is professor emerita at the University of California–Berkeley where she was the Eugene E. and Catherine M. Trefethen Professor of Business and Professor of Economics and has been a faculty member since 1980. In 2012, Yellen was appointed distinguished fellow of the American Economic Association. She served as President of the American Economic Association in 2020. Yellen is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the Economic Strategy Group of the Aspen Institute. Yellen graduated summa cum laude from Brown University with a degree in economics in 1967 and received her Ph.D. in economics from Yale University in 1971. Yale awarded Yellen the Wilbur Cross Medal in 1997. In 1998, Brown awarded her an Honorary Doctor of Laws degree. She has also received honorary degrees from Bard College, NYU, the London School of Economics and Political Science, the University of Warwick, Yale, the University of Michigan and the University of Pennsylvania. Her scholarship has covered a range of macroeconomic issues, with a special focus on the causes, mechanisms, and implications of unemployment.