Sheila C. Bair, former chair of the U.S. Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), president of Washington College and author of “The Bullies of Wall Street: This Is How Greed Messed Up Our Economy,” will present a public talk at 4:30 p.m., Wednesday, March 30, 2016, in Robertson Hall, Princeton University. A book sale and signing will follow the discussion. Bair is visiting the Woodrow Wilson School as this year's Anna and G. Mason Morfit '97 Distinguished Visitor.

Bair became president of Washington College, a historic liberal arts school located on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, in August 2015. She is perhaps best known for her role as the 19th chair of the FDIC, an appointment she held from June 2006 through July 2011.

While with the FDIC, Bair presided over one of the most tumultuous periods in the nation’s financial sector. With the upheaval and collapse of U.S. and global markets and financial institutions, Bair worked to bolster public confidence and financial system stability. Her efforts established her as an ardent advocate and innovator of policies to end the doctrine of “too-big-to-fail” and taxpayer bailouts.

She has been lauded for her fierce advocacy of the public interest in articles and editorials in The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Guardian, Financial Times and The New Yorker. As TIME Magazine stated in selecting her as one of its “100 Most Influential People,” she has served as “the little guy’s protector-in-chief.”

Bair has an extensive background in banking and finance in a career that has taken her from Capitol Hill to academia to the highest levels of government. Before joining the FDIC in 2006, she was the dean’s professor of financial regulatory policy for the Isenberg School of Management at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Other career experience includes serving as assistant secretary for financial institutions at the U.S. Department of the Treasury (2001 to 2002), senior vice president for government relations of the New York Stock Exchange (1995 to 2000), a commissioner of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (1991 to 1995), and research director, deputy counsel and counsel to Senate Majority Leader Robert Dole (1981 to 1988).

NOTE: ALL MEDIA MUST REGISTER AT brhuber@princeton.edu PRIOR TO EVENT. UNAUTHORIZED VIDEO AND/OR AUDIO TAPING PROHIBITED.