Nabiullina was born in Ufa, Bashkortostan, on 29 October 1963 in a Tatar family. Her father Sakhipzada Saitzadayevich was a driver, while her mother Zuleikha Khamatnurovna was a manager at a factory. Elvira graduated from school No. 31 of Ufa as an excellent pupil. She graduated from the Moscow State University in 1986. In subsequent years, she was also selected for the 2007 Yale World Fellows Program.
Career
Between 1991 and 1994 Nabiullina worked at the USSR Science and Industry Union and its successor, the Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs. In 1994 she moved to the Ministry for Economic Development and Trade, where she rose to the level of deputy minister by 1997; she left the ministry in 1998. She spent the next two years with Sberbank as its chief executive and with former Economic Development and Trade Minister German Gref's non-governmental think tank, the Center for Strategic Development, before returning to the Ministry for Economic Development and Trade as first deputy in 2000. Between 2003 and her September 2007 appointment as minister, she chaired the Center for Strategic Development as well as an advisory committee preparing for Russia's 2006 presidency of the G8 group of nations. Russian President Putin appointed Nabiullina to the post of minister of economic development and trade on 24 September 2007, replacing Gref. She found working with then-deputy premier and finance minister Alexei Kudrin "difficult but always interesting" and remained in that position until 21 May 2012. In 2012 she was one of six senior government figures to accompany Putin back to the Kremlin administration after Putin was elected president of Russia for a third term. In 2013 Nabiullina was appointed head of the Central Bank of Russia, becoming the second woman after Tatiana Paramonova to hold that position, and thus the first Russian woman in the G8. In May 2014 she was named one of the world's most powerful women by Forbes, which noted that she "has been given the difficult task of managing the ruble exchange rate during Ukraine's political crisis and facilitating growth for an economy trying to avoid a recession". In an effort to stop the ruble's slide, the Central Bank of Russia, under her leadership, hiked interest rates, free-floated the exchange rate, and kept a cap on inflation, thus stabilizing the financial system and boosting foreign-investor confidence. Euromoney magazine named her their 2015 Central Bank Governor of the Year. In 2017 British magazine The Banker chose Nabiullina as "Central Banker of the Year, Europe".
