Dalia Grybauskaitė

This Lithuanian President is a spinster and does not have any children. Her parents are no more and she does not have any siblings.

Apart from Lithuanian, she communicates well in Russian, English, Polish and elementary French.

Grybauskaitė was born to a working class family in Vilnius, on 1st March, 1956. While her father Polikarpas Grybauskaitė worked as a driver and an electrician, her mother, Vitalija Korsakaitė, was a saleswoman.

She pursued her primary education at the ‘Salomėja Nėris’ high school. Dalia was very fond of Geography and physics during her school days.

At the tender age of eleven, she started participating in sports, and even developed a passion for basketball at the same time.

While she was still a teenager, Dalia worked as the staff inspector of the ‘Lithuanian National Philharmonic Society’ during the period 1975-76.

She joined the ‘Zhdanov University’, Leningrad (now ‘Saint Petersburg State University’), to pursue her studies in political economy. During the same time, she also worked at a local factory named ‘Rot-Front’ as a technician.

Grybauskaitė was employed as the scientific secretary in 1983, at the society ‘Žinija’ under the ‘Academy of Sciences’. She also headed the ‘Agricultural Division’ at ‘Vilnius High Party School’ around the same time.

From 1985 to 1990, she resumed lectureship at the ‘Department of Political Economy’ of the ‘Vilnius High Party School’. Dalia was also a member of the ‘Communist Party of the Soviet Union’ at Vilnius during the same period.

Although the Lithuanian leader was busy with her political commitments, she managed to receive a doctorate in Economics in the year 1988, from the ‘Academy of Public Sciences’, Moscow.

During 1990-91, she was appointed to a secretarial position at the ‘Lithuanian Institute of Economics’ which was under the ‘Ministry of Economics’.

In the year 1991, Dalia Grybauskaitė was appointed to handle the role of the Director of Program, at the Prime Minister’s office.

In 2004, when she was chosen as the ‘European Union Commissioner’, the Lithuanian president demonstrated a new view in the budget which advocated expenditure in areas of research and development. She even critiqued the ‘EU budget’ for its excessive emphasis on agricultural programmes. Her involvement towards administrative concerns helped this Lithuanian leader become the ‘Commissioner of the Year’ the next year.