Ioana Petrescu


Ioana Maria Petrescu is a Romanian economist who served as the country's Finance Minister between March and December 2014.

Biography

The daughter of two engineers, she was brought up by her grandparents in Cornu until she went to school in Bucharest. After graduating from the Mihai Viteazul high school, she received a B.A in economics and mathematics from Wellesley College, and later a Ph.D in economics from Harvard University.
She worked as an N.R.I. Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, DC, before she became an assistant professor at the University of Maryland. Taking a two-year leave from teaching, she was named in the second half of 2013 a state counselor for economic affairs by Romanian prime-minister Victor Ponta.

Finance Minister of Romania

Despite a clear lack of experience, both career and politics wise, in 2014 she has been named Romania's Finance Minister. Following this, she took a job "somewhere at a 6 figure salary" according to her own statement.