Michelle Obama

(CC) Photo: Vincent Brown
Michelle Obama campaigning in Philadelphia, September 2008.

Michelle Obama (neé Michelle LaVaughn Robinson, born January 17, 1964 in Chicago, Illinois) is the current First Lady of the United States. She assumed the role on January 20th, 2009 when her husband, Barack Obama, entered office as 44th President of the United States of America and is the first African American to hold the title.

Obama is a lawyer by profession. She graduated from Princeton University with a BA in 1985. In 1988, she earned a doctorate (JD) from Harvard Law School and later worked for a law firm and in the public sector. The Obamas have two children, Malia Ann (born 1998) and Natasha (born 2001; known as Sasha).

Education and career

Michelle Obama grew up in a two-parent family in a working-class neighbourhood on Chicago's South Side, then graduated from Princeton (BA, 1985) and Harvard Law School (JD, 1988). She was an associate at a leading Chicago law form, Sidley and Austin, specializing in intellectual property. She became an aide to mayor Richard J. Daley, and then as the city of Chicago's assistant commissioner of planning and development. Since 2005 she has been vice president of community and external affairs at the University of Chicago Medical Center, where she is responsible for all programs that involve the relationship between the Hospitals and the community; she also supervises the Hospitals' business diversity program. In her senior thesis at Princeton in 1985, Mrs. Obama wrote that her college experience "made me far more aware of my 'blackness' than ever before, adding, "I will always be black first and a student second" on campus. At Harvard Law, Mrs. Obama, involved in the Black Law Students Association, pushed hard to improve the low numbers of African-American faculty and students.

(CC) Photo: Carl Clifford
Michelle Obama with her husband at the Midwest Inaugural Ball in January 2009, following his swearing-in as President of the United States.