Dalia Grybauskaitė

President of the Republic of Lithuania

Dalia Grybauskaitė has graduated from the University in Leningrad, faculty of political economy. After completing her studies as economist and lecturer of political economy, she returned to Vilnius and for a few months worked as a secretary in charge in the society “Žinija” under the then Academy of Sciences. She was Head of the Agriculture Division at Vilnius High Party School in 1983-1984, and later, in 1985-1990, a lecturer at the Department of Political Economy on the political economy and the world history of money. In 1988, she defended a scientific thesis at the Moscow Academy of Public Sciences. In 1991 she completed a special program for senior executives at the Georgetown University in Washington.

In 1991, she became a Programme Director in the Prime Minister’s Office of the Republic of Lithuania and 1993; she became Director of the Economic Relations Department at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. A year later she was appointed the Extraordinary Envoy and Plenipotentiary Minister at the Lithuanian Mission to the EU. In the 1 May 2004 under a resolution passed by the Government of the Republic of Lithuania, she was delegated to work in the European Commission. She was appointed EU Commissioner in charge of financial programming and budget of the European Union. After spending one-year in the European Commission, she was elected “Commissioner of the Year 2005″. In May 17, 2009 Dalia Grybauskaitė was elected President of the Republic of Lithuania.