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Obama picks Indian American
Sonal Shah as adviser
By
Arun Kumar
Washington,
Nov 6 (IANS) US President-elect Barack Obama has picked Indian-American
Sonal Shah, an eminent economist who heads Google's philanthropic
arm, as one of the advisers to help him assemble his White
House team.
Shah,
40, is part of an advisory board comprising individuals with
significant private and public sector experience who will
offer their expertise in their respective fields to Obama's
transition team, according to US media reports.
Meanwhile,
reports suggest that India-born Preeta Bansal, a Harvard-educated
lawyer who was part of Obama's team of advisers during his
election campaign, may be a potential candidate for the office
of the Solicitor General, a post yet to be filled by a woman
in US.
Sonal
Shah along with other members of the advisory board will help
the transition team headed by former White House chief of
staff John Podesta, longtime Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett,
and Pete Rouse, the President-elect's Senate chief of staff.
Others
on the list include former Environmental Protection Agency
administrator Carol Browner, Obama friend and former Commerce
Secretary William Daley, University of California-Berkeley
law school dean Christopher Edley and Obama law school friends
and advisers Michael Froman and Julius Genachowski.
Shah,
who was named the 'Person of the Year 2003' by India Abroad
publication, currently works for Google.org on their Global
Development team, where she is engaged in defining their global
development strategy and promoting the firm's philanthropy
work.
Before
joining Google, she was vice president at Goldman, Sachs and
Co. and developed and implemented its environmental strategy.
She has also served as the Associate Director for Economic
and National Security Policy at the Centre for American Progress,
where she worked on trade, outsourcing and post-conflict reconstruction
issues.
Earlier,
she worked for eight years at the Department of Treasury on
various economic issues and regions of the world. She was
the director of the office covering sub-Saharan Africa, worked
in Bosnia and Kosovo after the war, and served as the senior
adviser to the Under Secretary at the Department of Treasury
during the Asian financial crisis.
Shah
is the co-founder of the US-based non-profit organisation
Indicorps, which offers one-year fellowships for Indian-origin
Americans to work on specific development projects in India.
Her
father moved from Gujarat to New York in 1970 and she along
with her sister and mother joined him in 1972. She also has
a brother.
Among
names being suggested for the post of Solicitor General, the
'The Am Law Daily', citing some unnamed advisers of the Obama
campaign, reported that India-born Bansal, 42, who has advised
Obama on foreign policy and judiciary matters, is among possible
appointees.
"The
Solicitor General is the only position where the statute requires
that the officer be learned in the law," it quoted O'Melveny
and Myers's Walter Dellinger as saying.
Bansal,
a product of Harvard Law School and a partner at the international
law firm of Skadden Arps, has earlier served as the New York
state Solicitor General.
Dellinger
said that for the post, experience as a state Solicitor General
would be valuable, as would be a record of advocacy before
the court, the report said.
Bansal,
a member of what an Obama lawyer playfully calls the 'Harvard
Law School mafia', was part of Bill Clinton's White House
and Justice Department in 1993-96. She was also the first
Indian-American to head the US Commission on International
Religious Freedom.
Indo-Asian
News Service
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