Robert Zoellick

Zoellick was born in Illinois in 1953. In 1975, he graduated from Swarthmore College in the town of Swarthmore, 17 km outside Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA. He graduated from Harvard University in 1981 with a Juris Doctor from Harvard Law School and a Master of Public Policy from the Kennedy School of Government. From 1985 to 1988, Zoellick served in the Treasury Department, including as counselor to Secretary James Baker, Executive Secretary of the Treasury, and Deputy Assistant Secretary for Financial Institutions Policy. He received the Alexander Hamilton Award, the highest award of the Treasury Department. He was the main negotiator at the 2+4 German Unification Conference, for which he received the Grand Cross of the Order of Chivalry from the German government. The governments of Mexico and Chile awarded him the Order of the Aztec Eagle and the Order of Merit, respectively, the highest honors available to foreign citizens. He was Professor of National Security Affairs at the United States Naval Academy during the 1997-1998 fiscal year. He became the United States Trade Representative in 2001. He has reactivated the U.S. free trade process, increasing the number of free trade agreements in the United States fivefold. He succeeded Armitage as deputy secretary of State in 2005. He participated in the negotiations on the reunification of Germany, China's accession to the World Trade Organization, and the Doha Round of World Trade Organization negotiations. During his tenure as Deputy Secretary of State, he devoted himself to developing China-Us relations and put forward a new diplomatic concept of treating China as a stakeholder, which won praise from the Bush administration and other parties around the world. During his visit to China, he embraced a giant panda in Sichuan Province and was dubbed by the US media as "Hugger Panda Pie". Zoellick resigned as deputy secretary of state in June 2006 to become an international vice president at Goldman Sachs, a prominent Wall Street investment bank, giving him the ability to manage a large international organization. Zoellick's extensive experience in economics and diplomacy was a key reason he was nominated by former U.S. President George W. Bush and eventually approved by the World Bank's executive board. From 2007 to 2012, Robert Zoellick served as the 11th President of the World Bank. Zoellick is one of the world's leading authorities on the global economy, international finance and foreign policy. As president of the World Bank, he turned around troubled situations, recapitalizing banks and providing assistance to developing countries during food, fuel and energy crises. He has modernised the bank to make it more accountable, flexible, fast and transparent, fighting corruption and encouraging good governance. Through the bank's International Finance Corporation, he has played a growing role in the private sector, and under his leadership, business has grown, equity investment has expanded, investment has become more flexible, and poor countries, especially in Africa, have received support from sovereign funds and pensions. He is currently chairman of the International Advisory Board of Goldman Sachs and serves on the international advisory boards of Temasek, Singapore's largest sovereign wealth fund, Lauride International University Alliance and Rolls-Royce. Zoellick is also a senior fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government and a board member of the National Endowment for Democracy and the Peterson Institute for International Economics.