4/14/09 -- Federal Reserve Board Chairman Ben Bernanke will be the featured speaker at the Law School's 2009 Commencement ceremonies, to be held on Friday, May 22 at 2 p.m.  

"It is an honor for Boston College Law School to have Ben Bernanke speak at our commencement," said BC Law Dean John Garvey. "Dr. Bernanke is an incredibly accomplished man, in both the financial and academic worlds. Few people have the kind of insights on the world's economic situation that he does. I'm very pleased that he has agreed to speak to the graduating class."

Appointed as Fed chairman in 2006, Bernanke is considered a leading international economic expert and was named by Newsweek last year as the fourth most powerful person in the world.

Bernanke also is the chairman of the Federal Open Market Committee, which is the principal monetary policymaking body for the Fed. He has served the Federal Reserve System in several roles, first as a visiting scholar at the Federal Reserve Banks of Philadelphia, Boston and New York City, and as a member of the Academic Advisory Panel at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. He was a member of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System from 2002-2005.  

A native of Augusta, Ga., Bernanke grew up in Dillon, SC, and graduated summa cum laude from Harvard University with a bachelor's degree in economics in 1975, receiving his doctorate in economics from MIT in 1979.

Bernanke was a professor at the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University from 1979-85, when he joined the faculty of Princeton University, where he remained until 2002. While at Princeton, he was the Class of 1926 Professor of Economics and Public Affairs, the Howard Harrison and Gabrielle Snyder Beck Professor of Economics and Public Affairs and chair of the Economics Department.

His affiliations and honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Sloan Fellowship, and designation as a Fellow of the Econometric Society and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He was the director of the Monetary Economics Program of the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) and a member of NBER's Business Cycle Dating Committee. Bernanke was appointed editor of the American Economic Review in 2001.

Bernanke has also published numerous articles on a wide range of economic issues and written several scholarly books, as well as two textbooks.