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On day one of the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Donald Trump finally put months of speculation to rest when he unveiled his pick for his running mate.
Ohio Senator JD Vance will join him on the ticket in November’s election and his new role as the Republican Party’s nominee for the vice presidency has inspired fresh interest in the younger man’s back story.
Vance, 39, was already well known for his best-selling memoir Hillbilly Elegy (2016) before he entered politics, as well as for having been a scathing critic of Trump before running for office at which point he underwent a Damascene conversion and hailed him as a great president.
Many will now be acquainted with his journey from the US Marine Corps to Capitol Hill by way of Ohio State University, Yale Law School and a stint in San Francisco as a venture capitalist with Mithril Capital Management, a firm co-founded by the billionaire Peter Thiel.
Perhaps less well-known is the story of Vance’s wife Usha Chilukuri Vance.
A former Democrat, she joined her husband at the RNC on Monday as he was unveiled as Trump’s prospective second vice president, following in the footsteps of Mike Pence.
The daughter of academics Dr Krish Chilukuri and Professor Lakshmi Chilukuri, Hindu immigrants from Andhra Pradesh, India, Chilukuri, 38, was raised in the Rancho Penasquitos suburb of San Diego, California.
Remembered as a “bookworm” by childhood friends in a recent New York Times profile, she attended Mount Carmel High School in her hometown and then Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, where she graduated summa cum laude with a bachelor’s degree in history.
She then relocated to England as a Gates Cambridge Scholar, earning a Master of Philosophy degree in early modern history at Clare College, Cambridge University, in 2010.
Returning to New Haven, she graduated from Yale Law School in 2013, having also served as executive development editor of the Yale Law Journal and managing editor of the Yale Journal of Law & Technology.
After leaving academia, Chilukuri worked as a corporate litigator at the law firm Munger, Tolles & Olson LLP in their San Francisco and Washington DC offices, originally from 2015 to 2017 and then again from 2019 until this month. She reportedly handed in her notice within minutes of Trump’s announcement regarding her husband.
In between those two stints with Munger, she served as a law clerk at the US Supreme Court, clerking for Chief Justice John Roberts, as well as the Trump-nominated Judge Brett Kavanaugh and Judge Amul Thapar.
Chilukuri met Vance at Yale in the 2010s when they were classmates, the couple reportedly collaborating on the organisation of a discussion group on “social decline in white America”, later the subject of Vance’s book, which he was encouraged to write by their professor Amy Chua, also an early champion of the couple’s relationship.
Vance married his “Yale spirit guide” in Kentucky in 2014 and the couple have three children: Ewan (born 2017), Vivek (2020) and Mirabel (2021).
The politician is generally private about his family life but did read Dr Seuss’s book Oh, the Places You’ll Go! on the Senate floor this February in honour of Vivek’s birthday.
In Ron Howard’s Netflix adaptation of Hillbilly Elegy (2020), which starred Amy Adams and Glenn Close, Chilukuri was portrayed by the actress Freida Pinto.
Asked recently by Fox News whether she was ready for the national spotlight, she answered: “I don’t know that anyone is ever ready for that kind of scrutiny. I mean, I think we found the first campaign that he embarked on to be a shock. It was so different from anything we’d done before. But it was an adventure.
“And so I guess the way that I’d put it is, I’m not raring to change anything about our lives right now, but I believe in JD and I really love him. And so we’ll just sort of see what happens with our life. We’re open.”
