Obama graduated from Columbia University with a degree in political science in 1983, and moved to Chicago in 1985 to work as a community organizer in some of city’s toughest neighborhoods. In 1991, he graduated magna cum laude from Harvard Law School where he was the first African American editor of the Harvard Law Review.

Obama taught for many years at the University of Chicago Law School and helped organize voter registration drives during Bill Clinton’s election. He spent seven years in the Illinois state Senate, always putting working families at the top of his agenda. In 2004, he made a successful bid for the U.S. Senate, becoming only the third African-American elected to the Senate in more than a century.

In February 2007, Obama made headlines when he announced his candidacy for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination. He seis running against the likes of former first lady and current New York senator Hilary Rodham Clinton and is vigorously campaigning and fund-raising as the dates for the 2008 primaries approach.

Obama and his wife, Michelle, live on Chicago ’s South Side with their daughters, Malia and Sasha. In 2004, he published an autobiography, Dreams From My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance. His second book, The Audacity of Hope, was published in 2006. Biography.com