Barack Obama Academic, Author, Lawyer, and U.S. Politician

Barack Hussein Obama II is the President-elect of the United States of America. The first African American to be elected President of the United States, Obama was the junior United States Senator from Illinois in 2004 and served until his resignation on November 16, 2008, following his election to the Presidency. His term of office as the forty-fourth U.S. president will begin on January 20, 2009.

He is a graduate of Columbia University and Harvard Law School, where he was the first African-American president of the Harvard Law Review. Obama worked as a community organizer and practiced as a civil rights attorney in Chicago before serving three terms in the Illinois Senate from 1997 to 2004. He also taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago Law School from 1992 to 2004. Following an unsuccessful bid for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives in 2000, Obama was elected to the Senate in November 2004. Obama delivered the keynote address at the Democratic National Convention in July 2004.