Kirsten Gillibrand was first sworn in as United States Senator from New York in January 2009. In November 2012, Gillibrand was elected to her first six-year Senate term with a historic 72 percent of the vote, winning 60 of New York’s 62 counties.

Prior to her service in the Senate, Gillibrand served in the U.S. House of Representatives, representing New York's 20th Congressional District, which spanned 10 counties in upstate New York.

Throughout her time in Congress, Senator Gillibrand has been committed to open and honest government.  When she was first elected, she pledged to bring unprecedented transparency and

access to her post, and she did – becoming the first Member of Congress to post her official public schedule, personal financial disclosure and federal earmark requests online.  The New York Times called Gillibrand's commitment to transparency a "quiet touch of revolution" in Washington, and The Sunlight Foundation, the leading advocacy organization dedicated to making government more open and transparent, praised Senator Gillibrand as a pioneer for her work.  For more information, visit Senator Gillibrand's Sunlight Report at http://gillibrand.senate.gov/sunlight/.

She hasn’t let up since.  In 2012, Senator Gillibrand became the first Senator in history to publish her personal tax returns for every year she has served in office directly on her own website and led the effort to pass the STOCK Act, legislation to finally make insider trading by members of Congress illegal, making them play by the exact same set of rules as every other American.  A Washington Post report hailed the STOCK Act as the “most substantial debate on congressional ethics in nearly five years.”

In the U.S. Senate, Senator Gillibrand has made her presence felt, helping lead the fight to repeal "Don't Ask Don't Tell," the policy that banned gays from serving openly in the military, and providing health care and compensation to the 9/11 first responders and community survivors who are sick with diseases caused by the toxins at Ground Zero.  Senator Gillibrand worked to bring Democrats and Republicans together to win both legislative victories, leading Newsweek/The Daily Beast to name Senator Gillibrand one of “150 Women Who Shake the World.”

From her seat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, Gillibrand has been a vocal advocate for strengthening America's armed services, national security and military readiness.  In 2013, as chair of the sub-committee on personnel, she held the first Senate hearing on the issue of sexual assault in the military in almost a decade.  Gillibrand went on to lead the fight in reforming how the military handles sexual assault cases, building a broad bipartisan coalition of 55 Senators in support of legislation to remove sexual assault cases from the chain of command.

In April 2014, in honor of her ability to work across the aisle and elevate the issues that are important to her, Gillibrand was named one of Time Magazine's "100 Most Influential People In The World."

Senator Gillibrand's number one priority is to rebuild the American economy, by creating good- paying jobs, helping small businesses get loans and partnering with the private sector to foster innovation and entrepreneurship.  She wrote new legislation to strengthen and retool New York’s manufacturers, stamp more products with the words “Made in America” and create new manufacturing jobs in New York.

As the mother of two young children, Senator Gillibrand knows that working families are struggling in this difficult economy, and her legislative agenda puts middle class and working families first.  As a champion for the economic empowerment of women & working families, Senator Gillibrand has proposed her Opportunity Agenda to rewrite the rules of the workplace to ensure that every working woman has the ability to remain in the workforce and earn her full economic potential.  This agenda includes providing paid family & medical leave, raising the minimum wage, making quality child care affordable, creating universal pre-K and ensuring equal pay for equal work.  Gillibrand's FAMILY Act would create a national paid leave program for all workers for less than the cost of a cup of coffee a week per employee.

As the first New York Senator to sit on the Agriculture Committee in nearly 40 years, Senator Gillibrand is giving New York families the seat at the table they deserve as Congress debates food policy.  She worked hard to strengthen the 2012 Farm Bill for New York by strengthening specialty crops, expanding rural broadband and improving recovery efforts from natural disasters.  She also led the unsuccessful fight to stop billions in devastating cuts to nutritional assistance for struggling children, seniors and veterans.

From her seat on the Aging Committee, Senator Gillibrand is committed to fighting on behalf of seniors, working to lower the cost of prescription drugs, make long-term care more affordable so seniors can remain independent for as long as they are able and protect seniors from financial fraud.  Senator Gillibrand is also working to lower property taxes, co-sponsoring legislation that would give New York residents a full federal tax deduction for their property taxes.

After attending Albany's Academy of Holy Names, Senator Gillibrand graduated in 1984 from Emma Willard School in Troy, New York, the first all women's high school in the United States.  A magna cum laude graduate of Dartmouth College in 1988, Gillibrand went on to receive her law degree from the UCLA School of Law in 1991 and served as a law clerk on the Second Circuit Court of Appeals.

After working as an attorney in New York City for more than a decade, Senator Gillibrand served as Special Counsel to United States Secretary of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Andrew Cuomo during the Clinton Administration.  She then worked as an attorney in Upstate New York before becoming a member of Congress.

Born and raised in upstate New York, Senator Gillibrand's home is in Brunswick, New York, with her husband, Jonathan Gillibrand, and their two young sons, 10-year-old Theodore and six-year-old Henry.