Janet Yellen, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, is expected to be nominated by President Barack Obama as vice chair of the Federal Reserve Board. Ms. Yellen, 63 years old, has served as a Fed policy maker for almost a decade between her stints in Washington and San Francisco.

Policy stance:

Ms. Yellen has been a reliable supporter of Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke‘s policies. She is frequently cited by economists as one of the central bank’s most dovish policymakers, generally backing policies that would boost growth and reduce high unemployment. She has long been a counterweight to the Fed’s more hawkish regional bank presidents who tend to be more concerned about rising inflation. (The Fed’s dual mandate from Congress is to promote maximum sustainable employment and price stability.)

Voting record:

In her time as a Fed policy maker, Ms. Yellen has never cast a dissenting vote on policy — in either raising interest rates or lowering them. She has voted 36 times as a member of the Federal Open Market Committee, always with the majority, according to a tally by Wrightson-ICAP. Of the 12 current regional bank presidents, five have dissented at least once. Of current FOMC officials, only three have cast more votes on interest-rate policy in their careers: Vice Chairman Donald Kohn (63 votes), Kansas City Fed President Thomas Hoenig (60 votes) and Chairman Bernanke (56 votes), according to the Wrightson tally.

Policy experience:

Ms. Yellen has been president and chief executive officer of the San Francisco Fed since June 2004. She served as a Fed governor from August 1994 through February 1997. She left the Fed to become chair of the Council of Economic Advisers under President Bill Clinton through August 1999. In 1977 and 1978 she served as a staff economist on the Fed’s Board of Governors in the Division of International Finance (Trade and Financial Studies Section).

Academic background:

Ms. Yellen graduated from Brown University in 1967 with a degree in economics and received her doctorate in economics from Yale University four years later. She taught at Harvard from 1971 to 1976, then the London School of Economics from 1978 to 1980. She has been on the faculty at the University of California at Berkeley since 1980, most recently as a professor of business and professor of economics.

Research:

Ms. Yellen’s key research interests are unemployment and labor markets; monetary and fiscal policies; and international trade and investment policy. A respected scholar, she has written widely on income inequality and published numerous papers with her husband, George Akerlof, the Nobel prize-winning economist. (Among them: “An Analysis of Out-of-Wedlock Childbearing in the United States” in 1996 and “East Germany In From the Cold: The Economic Aftermath of Currency Union” in 1991.) In 2001, she published “The Fabulous Decade: Macroeconomic Lessons from the 1990s” with former Fed vice chair Alan Blinder.

In her own words:

Ms. Yellen, in her most recent speech, defended the Fed’s near-zero interest rate target. “Such accommodative policy is appropriate, in my view, because the economy is operating well below its potential and inflation is undesirably low. I believe this is not the time to be removing monetary stimulus.”