sworn in on May 23, 2022. In February 2023, Biden announced Brainard as Brian Deese's successor as Director of the National Economic Council. She resigned her positions as Federal Reserve governor and Vice Chair on February 18, 2023. Early life and education Lael Brainard, daughter of the U.S. foreign-service officer and diplomat Alfred Brainard, grew up in West Germany and later Poland in the period before the Revolutions of 1989 and the Fall of the Berlin Wall. She graduated with university honors from Wesleyan University with a bachelor of arts degree from the College of Social Studies. Brainard received masters and doctoral degrees in economics from Harvard University, where she was a National Science Foundation Fellow. She is the recipient of a White House Fellowship and a Council on Foreign Relations International Affairs Fellowship. She received the Alexander Hamilton Award for her service at the Department of the Treasury and was awarded the Harvard GSAS Centennial Medal and the New York Association of Business Economics William F. Butler Award in 2019. Career Private sector Brainard started her career at McKinsey & Company advising corporate clients on strategic challenges. Brainard served as Assistant and Associate Professor of Applied Economics at the MIT Sloan School of Management from 1990 to 1996 where her publications made important contributions on the relationship between offshore production, trade, and jobs; the measurement of structural and cyclical unemployment in the U.S. economy; and strategic trade policy. Brainard was a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution from 2001 to 2009 and Vice President and Director of the Global Economy and Development Program from 2006 to 2009. White House Beginning in 1997 Brainard served as deputy national economic advisor and deputy assistant to the president during the Clinton administration. In this role, she was the White House staff coordinator for the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) Leaders Meeting in Vancouver and Manila; responsible for the President's three-year review of NAFTA; and for preparing the way for China’s entry into the WTO. She was also responsible for the G7/G8 Jobs Conferences in the U.K. and France, and took part in President Clinton's visits to China, Latin America, the U.K., and the Summit of the Americas held in Miami. As deputy director of the National Economic Council, she helped build a new White House organization to address global economic challenges such as the Asian financial crisis and China's accession to the World