Brian Emanuel Schatz (; born October 20, 1972) is an American educator and politician serving as the senior United States senator from Hawaii, a seat he has held since 2012. A member of the Democratic Party, Schatz served in the Hawaii House of Representatives from 1998 to 2006, representing the 25th legislative district; as the chairman of the Democratic Party of Hawaii from 2008 to 2010; and as the 11th lieutenant governor of Hawaii from 2010 to 2012. Schatz also worked as chief executive officer of Helping Hands Hawaii, an Oahu nonprofit social service agency, until he resigned to run for lieutenant governor of Hawaii in the 2010 gubernatorial election as Abercrombie's running mate. He served as lieutenant governor until December 26, 2012, when Abercrombie appointed him to serve the rest of Daniel Inouye's U.S. Senate term after Inouye's death. Schatz was the youngest U.S. senator in the 112th Congress. He won the 2014 special election to complete the remainder of Inouye's Senate term with just under 70% of the vote, was reelected in 2016 with 73.6%, and again in 2022 with 71.2%. Early life Brian Schatz was born into a Jewish-American family in Ann Arbor, Michigan, along with an identical twin brother, Steve. He is the son of Barbara Jane (née Binder) and Irwin Jacob Schatz, a cardiologist and native of Saint Boniface, Manitoba. Schatz's father was the first to complain about the ethics of the Tuskegee syphilis experiment, in a 1965 letter. The letter was ignored until the problem finally came to public attention in 1972. Irwin Schatz wrote that he was "astounded" that "physicians allow patients with potentially fatal disease to remain untreated when effective therapy is available." Brian Schatz said that his father didn't talk about the letter, but that it influenced him to pursue the public good. When Schatz and his brother were two years old the family moved to Hawaii, where Schatz graduated from Punahou School. Schatz enrolled at Pomona College in Claremont, California; he spent a term studying abroad in Kenya on a program of the School for International Training (SIT). As a U.S. senator, Schatz is one of Pomona’s highest-profile alumni; Pomona invited him to be the commencement speaker for its Class of 2017. After graduating in 1994 with a B.A. in philosophy, he returned to Hawaii, where he taught at Punahou before taking on other jobs in the nonprofit sector. He