President-elect of the United States, Joe Biden, is putting together his team ahead of his inauguration on January 20, 2021.
Among Biden’s team of top cabinet picks and economic advisers is Nigerian-born Adewale Adeyemo, who served as a senior international economic adviser in the Barack Obama administration.
Adeyemo will be handed the role of Deputy Treasury Secretary. He would be the first black person to occupy the office.
Janet L. Yellen, the former Federal Reserve chair, has been tapped to serve as Treasury Secretary.
Adeyemo was born in Nigeria in 1981. He however grew up in California. He migrated to the United States with his parents, as a baby.
His father was a teacher and his mother was a nurse. Adeyemo and his younger brother and sister grew up sharing a room in a two-bedroom apartment.
Adeyemo, 39, has extensive experience working at the Treasury Department during the Obama administration, when he was a Senior Adviser and Deputy Chief of Staff.
Adeyemo was also Obama’s chief negotiator for the macroeconomic policy provisions of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, and served as the first Chief of Staff of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
After serving as Senior Adviser for two years at BlackRock, he joined the Obama Foundation in 2019 as its president.
He currently sits on the boards of Golden State Opportunity Foundation and Aspen Strategy Group, among others.
He was an editor for the Hamilton Project at the Brookings Institution from 2008 to 2009.
Adeyemo is a graduate of the University of California, Berkeley and Yale Law School.
At Yale, he was the co-director, project on law and education.
