As of December 2019, who is the President of the European Commission?

Ursula Gertrud von der Leyen (born 8 October 1958) is a German politician and the President of the European Commission since 1 December 2019. She served in the federal government of Germany from 2005 to 2019 as the longest-serving member of Angela Merkel's cabinet.

She was born and raised in Brussels, where her father Ernst Albrecht was one of the first European civil servants. She was brought up bilingually in German and French, and is of German and British American descent. She moved to Hanover in 1971, when her father entered politics to become Minister President of the state of Lower Saxony in 1976.

As an economics student at the London School of Economics in the late 1970s, she lived under the name Rose Ladson, the family name of her American great-grandmother from Charleston, South Carolina. After graduating as a physician from the Hanover Medical School in 1987, she specialized in women's health.

As a mother of seven children, she was a housewife during parts of the 1990s and lived for four years in Stanford, California, while her husband was on faculty at Stanford University, returning to Germany in 1996.

On 2 July 2019, von der Leyen was proposed by the European Council as the candidate for the office of President of the European Commission. She was elected by the European Parliament on 16 July. She is the first woman to become President of the European Commission.