Piyush "Bobby" Jindal (born June 10, 1971) is an American politician who served as the 55th governor of Louisiana from 2008 to 2016. The only living former Louisiana governor, Jindal also served as a member of the U.S. House of Representatives and Chairman of the Republican Governors Association. In 1995, Jindal was appointed secretary of the Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals. In 1999, he was appointed president of the University of Louisiana System. At 28, Jindal became the youngest person to hold the position. In 2001, President George W. Bush appointed Jindal as principal adviser to the U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services. Jindal first ran for governor of Louisiana in 2003, but narrowly lost in the run-off election to Democratic candidate Kathleen Blanco. In 2004, he was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, becoming the second Indian American in Congress, and he was reelected in 2006. To date, he is the only Indian-American Republican to have ever served in Congress. Jindal ran for governor again in the 2007 election and won. Jindal was re-elected in 2011 in a landslide, winning more than 65 percent of the vote. He was the first Indian American governor, and the only one until Nikki Haley was elected Governor of South Carolina in 2010. On June 24, 2015, Jindal announced his candidacy for the Republican nomination in the 2016 presidential election. He suspended his campaign in November 2015, subsequently announcing his support for Marco Rubio. He finished his term as governor in January 2016. Early life and education Piyush Jindal was born on June 10, 1971 in Baton Rouge, Louisiana to immigrant Punjabi Hindu parents. He is the first of two sons of Raj (née Gupta) and Amar Jindal, from Punjab, India. His father is a civil engineer and graduate of Guru Nanak Dev University and Punjab University. His mother is a graduate of Rajasthan University and worked in nuclear physics at the Post Graduate Institute of Medical Education and Research in Chandigarh. Before migrating to the United States, both his parents were lecturers at an Indian engineering college. At the time of their move to the U.S., Raj Jindal was to be a doctoral candidate in physics. They left Malerkotla, Punjab in January 1971, six months before their son was born. Jindal's paternal grandfather was a merchant from Khanpur, Samrala and his maternal grandfather was a Ferozepur banker. The family