Janet L. Yellen is the Eugene E. and Catherine M. Trefethen Professor Emeritus of Business Administration at the Haas School of Business and Professor Emeritus of Economics at the University of California, Berkeley, within the Business & Economics faculty. She earned a B.A. in Economics summa cum laude from Brown University in 1967 and a Ph.D. in Economics from Yale University in 1971. Yellen joined the Berkeley faculty in 1980, where she taught macroeconomics, economics, and international trade to thousands of undergraduate and MBA students over 26 years in programs including the full-time MBA and Evening & Weekend MBA. Her teaching excellence earned her the Earl F. Cheit Award for Excellence in Teaching at Haas in 1985 and 1988, the school's highest teaching honor.

Yellen's main academic specialties are macroeconomics and international economics, with research interests encompassing unemployment and labor markets, monetary and fiscal policies, stabilization policy in the United States and Japan, and international trade and investment policy. Key publications include co-editing Efficiency Wage Models of the Labor Market with George A. Akerlof (Cambridge University Press, 1987) and co-authoring Stabilization Policy: A Reconsideration in Economic Inquiry (2006). Other notable works feature Macroprudential Supervision and Monetary Policy in the Post-crisis World in Business Economics (2011) and contributions to the Quarterly Journal of Economics and Journal of Political Economy. She has been recognized as a Distinguished Fellow of the American Economic Association, Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2001), and Fellow of the Yale Corporation. Yellen's career also includes landmark appointments such as Chair of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers (1997-1999), Vice Chair (2010-2014) and Chair (2014-2018) of the Federal Reserve, and 78th Secretary of the Treasury (2021-), making her the first person to lead the White House Council of Economic Advisers, the Federal Reserve, and the Treasury Department.