Janet L. Yellen
President and Chief Executive Officer

Janet L. Yellen took office as President and Chief Executive Officer of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco on June 14, 2004. As a member of the Federal Open Market Committee, Dr. Yellen fully participates in the meetings and brings her District's perspective to policy discussions in Washington.

Dr. Yellen is Professor Emeritus at the University of California at 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.

Dr. Yellen earlier took leave from Berkeley for five years starting August 1994 when she served as a member of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System through February 1997, and then left the Fed to become Chair of the Council of Economic Advisers through August 1999. She also chaired the Economic Policy Committee of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development from 1997 to 1999.

Dr. Yellen became a member of The Group of 30 in September 2009. She also serves on the executive committee of the Bay Area Council and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Dr. Yellen is a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research and has served as president of the Western Economic Association and vice president of the American Economic Association. She was also a Fellow of the Yale Corporation.

Dr. Yellen graduated summa cum laude from Brown University with a degree in economics in 1967, and received her PhD in Economics from Yale University in 1971. She received 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.

An Assistant Professor at Harvard University from 1971 to 1976, Dr. Yellen served as an economist with the Federal Reserve’s Board of Governors in 1977 and 1978, and on the faculty of the London School of Economics and Political Science from 1978 to 1980.

Dr. Yellen has written on a wide variety of macroeconomic issues, while specializing in the causes, mechanisms and implications of unemployment.

The Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco provides wholesale banking services to financial institutions in the nine western states through its head office in San Francisco, branch offices in Los Angeles, Portland, Salt Lake City, and Seattle, and a cash processing office in Phoenix. As the nation's central bank, the Federal Reserve System formulates monetary policy, serves as a bank regulator, administers consumer protection laws, and is fiscal agent for the U.S. government. The Twelfth District is the largest in the Federal Reserve System, encompassing 36 percent of the nation's land area, and 20 percent of its population, employment, and the nation's personal income.

Updated January 2009