Sheryl Sandberg is an American business executive and philanthropist. Sandberg held the position of Chief Operating Officer (COO) at Meta (formerly known as Facebook) from 2008 to 2022 after which Javier Olivan succeeded her. She also serves on Metas board of directors. Before joining Meta, then called Facebook, Sheryl had served as Vice President of Global Online Sales and Operations at Google, Chief of Staff for United States Secretary of the Treasury, Lawrence Summers under President Clinton, a management consultant with McKinsey & Company, and an economist with the World Bank.She grew up in North Miami Beach, Florida, where her parents moved when she was 2. Childhood picture of Sheryl Sandberg with her parents and siblings.Growing up in a Jewish family, with parents who were actively involved in helping Jews leave the Soviet Union, Sheryl spent her childhood attending rallies. Her parents helped create the South Florida Conference on Soviet Jewry and turned their home into a safe haven for Soviet Jews looking to escape anti-Semitism. The Sandberg family was actively involved with Temple Sinai in North Miami Beach, especially in the temples advocacy for the freeing of Soviet Jews. In 1982, when Sandberg was 13, she was featured in a Miami Herald article about Soviet Jews. In the article, she shared that she attended her first rally when she was one year old and had participated in protest marches, handed out petitions, and worked on letter-writing campaigns to help advance their cause ever since. Sheryl Sandbergs parents, Joel Sandberg and Adele Sandberg, actively setting up South Florida Conference on Soviet Jewry.In 1987, Sheryl graduated ninth in her class with a 4.646 GPA from North Miami Beach Senior High School. Sheryl Sandberg graduating from North Miami Senior High in 1987.While studying at Harvard, Sandberg founded a group initiative called Women in Economics and Government. According to her, the group was created to encourage more women to major in government and economics.As an undergraduate at Harvard, Sandberg first got the attention of her professor Larry Summers in a class on public sector economics. Upon Lawrence Summerss appointment as Chief Economist at the World Bank in 1991, he recruited Sandberg as a research assistant. During her two-year stint at the World Bank, Sheryl had the opportunity to travel to India, where she worked on health projects like leprosy, AIDS, and blindness in the countrys most remote and poorest regions, prompting her to go back to Harvard to study for a law degree. However, she later changed it to a business degree.After receiving her MBA in 1995, Sheryl spent a year working for McKinsey & Company, a global management consulting firm in Los Angeles, before returning to Washington, D.C to work for Summers.In 1996, she again started working for Summers, who was promoted to Deputy Secretary of the Treasury under his long-time political mentor Robert Rubin in 1995.When Summers succeeded Rubin as Secretary of the Treasury in 1999, he promoted Sheryl to the position of Chief of Staff. Sheryl Sandberg with Treasury Secretary Larry Summers.She began her career in the tech business in Silicon Valley in 2001 when she joined Google three years after the company was founded. As Business Unit General Manager at Google, Sandberg was responsible for sales operations for the companys consumer products and Google Book Search. Apart from that, she was also instrumental in launching Google.org, the search giants philanthropic arm.