Donna Shalala

Donna Shalala

Donna Edna Shalala is an American politician and academic. She is the U.S. Representative for Florida’s 27th congressional district. She previously served as the 18th United States Secretary of Health and Human Services under President Bill Clinton from 1993 to 2001. Shalala served as President of the University of Miami, a private university in Coral Gables, Florida, from 2001 through 2015.

About Donna Shalala in brief

Summary Donna ShalalaDonna Edna Shalala is an American politician and academic. She is the U.S. Representative for Florida’s 27th congressional district, having been first elected in 2018. She previously served as the 18th United States Secretary of Health and Human Services under President Bill Clinton from 1993 to 2001. Shalala served as President of the University of Miami, a private university in Coral Gables, Florida, from 2001 through 2015. Previously she was the President of Hunter College from 1980 until 1988 and chancellor of University of Wisconsin–Madison from 1988 to 1993. She was defeated in the 2020 general election by Maria Elvira Salazar. Her father sold real estate; and her mother, one of the first Lebanese-Americans to graduate from The Ohio State University, was a teacher who worked two jobs and attended law school at night. She has a twin sister, Diane Fritel, and a brother, David Fritels. She received a bachelor’s degree in 1962 from Western College for Women. From 1962 to 1964, she was among the first volunteers to serve in the Peace Corps. Her placement took her to Iran where she worked with other volunteers to construct an agricultural college. In 1970, she earned a Ph. D. from the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University in Syracuse, New York. In 1975, Shalala became the only woman on the Municipal Assistance Corporation, a group tasked with saving New York City from a financial crisis. In 1996, she became the nation’s longest-serving HHS secretary, becoming the designated survivor during Clinton’s State of the Union address.

In 2001, she joined the boards of UnitedHealth and Lennar, where she earned millions of dollars over the following decade. In 2010, it was reported it was to avoid a conflict of interest when she left the board of Lennar’s CEO, Stuart Miller, to avoid the company’s CEO’s interest in two companies that were run by her former colleagues. In 2012, she left Lennar to become the CEO of a company that was run by Lennar CEO Stuart Lennar. In 2013, she announced she was stepping down from her position at Lennar as a result of a sexual harassment scandal. She also served as Trustee Professor of Political Science and Health Policy at the Universityof Miami, and was President at the Clinton Foundation from 2015 to 2017. She served as chair of the Children’s Defense Fund for a year. She became the first woman to lead a Big Ten Conference school, and only the second woman in the country to head a major research university. She helped hire football coach Barry Alvarez who went on to become Wisconsin’s all-time leader in football wins, with numerous appearances by Wisconsin at the Rose Bowl. In 2000, she helped start, the start of his role for 539 billion dollars. At the time of her tenure, the Department of Health Services employed 125,000 people and had an annual budget of USD 1 billion. In 2002, she resigned from her role as president of the UnitedHealth.