Michael Froman

Born August 20, 1962, Froman grew up in a Jewish family in San Rafael and graduated from the Branson School. As a teenager, Froman was active in the B'nai B'rith Youth Organization, serving as the 56th International President in 1980. He later spoke at the BBYO International Convention in Washington, D.C., in February 2013. Froman received a B.A. in Public and International Affairs from the Woodrow Wilson School of Princeton University with a senior thesis entitled Negotiating from Strength: The Principle of Power in US-Soviet Arms Control in 1985, a D.Phil. in International Relations entitled The development of the idea of detente in American political discourse, 1952-1985, supervised by Sir Michael Howard, from St Antony's College, Oxford, in 1988 and a J.D. from Harvard Law School where he was a classmate of Barack Obama, and also where he was an associate of Obama on the Harvard Law Review.

Froman served as liaison of the American Bar Association's Central and East European Law Initiative (CEELI) legal assistance program in Albania. He was also a member of the Forward Studies Unit of the European Commission in Brussels.

Froman served as a White House Fellow in 1992-93 and worked in the White House Office of Economic & Domestic Policy.

Between January 1993 and December 1995, Froman was Deputy National Security Advisor for International Economic Affairs on the United States National Economic Council, a position held jointly at the National Security Council and the National Economic Council. He was Deputy Assistant Secretary for Eurasia and the Middle East, where his work was related to economic policy towards the former Soviet Union, Central and Eastern Europe, as well as economic components of the Dayton Accords. He was a Senior Fellow at the Council of Foreign Relations and a Resident Fellow at the German Marshall Fund.

Froman spent much of his career within the United States Department of the Treasury where he rose to Chief of Staff under Robert Rubin in January 1997 and served until July 1999.

After the end of the Clinton administration in 2001, Froman followed Robert Rubin from the Treasury Department to Citigroup. He was President and Chief Executive Officer of CitiInsurance and head of Emerging Markets Strategy at Citigroup, managing infrastructure and sustainable development investments. He received more than $7.4 million from January 2008 to 2009 alone.

Froman and Obama were not in touch after their time at Harvard until Obama's 2004 Senate campaign, when Froman volunteered to advise Obama on policy; he introduced Obama to Robert Rubin. In 2008, Froman served on a 12-member advisory board of the Obama campaign's transition team, and joined the White House for a second run in 2009. He went back to the position he held during the Clinton years, as deputy assistant to the president and deputy national security adviser for international economic affairs, at the National Security Council and the National Economic Council until 2013.