Jennifer Psaki: Incoming Biden Administration Press Secy. Image: U.S. Department of State Daily Press Briefing by Spokesperson Jen Psaki, Mar 19, 2015. Used under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License;

Incoming US President Joe Biden has chosen Jennifer Psaki, pronounced SOCK-ee, 42, as his chief spokesperson. Psaki was White House Communications Director from 2015 to 2017. She also worked under Secretary of State John Kerry, becoming both adept and comfortable delivering 90-minute briefings on critical foreign policy issues as complex as a dispute over the South China Sea, writes the Times.

Prior assignments included joining Obama’s 2008 campaign early on as a deputy press secretary, where she was quickly promoted to traveling press secretary and Obama’s chief spokesperson on the road. Read more about Psaki’s early assignments background at Open Secrets.

In September, 2011 Jen Psaki left the White House to head the Washington office of the public affairs and research firm Global Strategy Group. The communications expert was known as “an island of calm and karma “aboard both campaign planes and later in the “tumultuous West Wing”, wrote GSG in announcing her new position.

Psaki’s GSG tenure was short-lived, with the rising communications star returning to political communications as press secretary for President Barack Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign, becoming spokesperson for the United States Dept. of State.

At the State Department, Jen Psaki moved the spokesperson’s office, from the sixth floor and inaccessible to reporters, to a new location next to the press room.

In February 7, 2017 Psaki began working as a political commentator on CNN, a position she left in November 2020, to join the Biden-Harris transition team.

“I think she brings as much experience in that building, as much as anyone has ever brought to the job,” said Robert Gibbs, who served as Mr. Obama’s first White House press secretary, on hearing this week of Psaki’s appointment as Biden’s Press Secretary. Gibbs told the Times. “The world this administration inherits has more challenges than any in nearly a century. Having a steady, experienced voice behind that podium will serve them well.”

Jen Psaki married her spouse Gregory Mecher in 2010, after meeting him in 2006 as a deputy finance director at the DCCC who regularly traveled in "a very small entourage" with Rahm Emanuel. Psaki was six weeks into a new communications gig with the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and Rahm Emanuel, then chairman of the DCCC, was traveling to Philadelphia to speak at an event where she would be handling the media, wrote the Washington Post in announcing their marriage.

The couple has one daughter Genevieve Mecher.