United States Federal Reserve · Public domain

Chaired the Federal Reserve from 2006 to 2014, steering its response to the 2008 financial crisis and becoming one of its most visible public faces — Time named him its 2009 Person of the Year. His academic work, done mostly at Princeton before he entered government, focused on how banking failures deepened the Great Depression; that research won him the 2022 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, shared with Douglas Diamond and Philip Dybvig.