Two months after the Biden-Harris transition office nominated Janet L. Yellen to lead the Treasury Department, she was confirmed Monday, January 25 as the 78th United States Secretary of the Treasury by the Senate.

Yellen is the first woman to lead the Treasury Department in its nearly 232-year history.

Previously, Yellen, 74, served as the 15th Chair of the Federal Reserve chair (2014-2018). Prior, she was the 19th Vice-Chair of the Federal Reserve (2010-2014). She served as a member of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors (2010-2018).

Before that, Yellen was the 11th president of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco (2004-2010). In the late 1990s, she served as a top economic adviser to the White House and was the 18th chair of the Council of Economic Advisers (1997-1999).

According to her biography on Wikipedia, Yellen was born to a Polish Jewish family in the Bay Ridge neighborhood of New York City's Brooklyn borough, where she also grew up.

Her mother was Anna Ruth (née Blumenthal; 1907–1986), an elementary school teacher, and her father Julius Yellen (1906–1975), a family physician, who worked from the ground floor of their home. Her mother quit her job to take care of Janet and her older brother, John. Yellen graduated from local Fort Hamilton High School in 1962; she was the class valedictorian.

In 1967, Yellen graduated summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from Pembroke College in Brown University with a degree in economics. At Brown, she switched her planned major from philosophy to economics and was influenced by professors George Borts and Herschel Grossman.

She received her Ph.D. 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 (later to be) Nobel laureate James Tobin.

Her former professor Joseph Stiglitz, another Nobelist, has called Yellen one of his brightest and most memorable students. Two dozen economists earned their Ph.D. from Yale in 1971, including Gary Smith, but Yellen was the only woman among them.