This year Yellen is a voting member of the Federal Reserve's Federal Open Market Committee, which sets benchmark interest rates in response to economic conditions. During her term, the committee has cut the federal funds rate to near zero in an effort to relieve a massive credit crunch. In response to the economic crisis, the committee also decided March 18 to purchase up to an additional $750 billion of mortgage-backed securities, bringing its total purchases of such securities to $1.25 trillion this year.
Yellen took office as president and CEO of the Twelfth District Federal Reserve Bank in San Francisco in 2004. A member of the Haas School faculty since 1980, she has written on a wide variety of macroeconomic issues, while specializing in the causes, mechanisms, and implications of unemployment.
She took a leave from Berkeley for five years in 1994, when she served as a member of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System and then as chair of the President's Council of Economic Advisers. She also chaired the Economic Policy Committee of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development from 1997 to 1999.
Yellen serves on the board of directors of the Pacific Council on International Policy. She has served as president of the Western Economic Association and as vice president of the American Economic Association, and was a fellow of the Yale Corporation, among other posts.
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 has received many awards, including the Wilbur Cross Medal from Yale in 1997 and an honorary doctor of laws degree from Brown in 1998.