Angela Dorothea Merkel is a German politician and a former research scientist, who has been the Chancellor of Germany since 2005 and the leader of the Christian Democratic Union since 2000. She is the first woman to hold either office, the first German Chancellor to be born after World War II, and the first post-reunification Chancellor to be raised in the former East Germany. Having earned a doctorate as a physical chemist, Merkel entered politics in the wake of the Revolutions of 1989, briefly serving as the deputy spokesperson for the first democratically elected East German Government in 1990. Following the German reunification in 1990, she was elected to the Bundestag for Stralsund-Nordvorpommern-R�gen in the state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, a seat she has held ever since. She was later appointed as the Federal Minister for Women and Youth in 1991 under Chancellor Helmut Kohl, and became the Federal Minister for the Environment, Nature Conservation, and Nuclear Safety in 1994, serving until 1998. After the CDU/CSU coalition was defeated in 1998, she was elected Secretary-General of the CDU, before being elected the party's first ever woman as leader in 2000. 

July 17th, 1954 in Eimsbüttel (Age 69) as Angela Dorothea Kasner