High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! Valerie Bowman Jarrett (born November 14, 1956) is a senior advisor and assistant to the president for Public Engagement and Intergovernmental Affairs for the Obama administration. She is also a Chicago lawyer, businesswoman, and civic leader. Prior to that she served as a co-chairperson of the Obama-Biden Transition Project.Jarrett was born to American parents James E. Bowman and Barbara Taylor Bowman in Shiraz, Iran, where her father, a pathologist and geneticist, ran a hospital for children as part of a program where American doctors and agricultural experts sought to help jump-start developing countries' health and farming efforts. When she was five, the family moved to London for one year, returning to Chicago in 1963.