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On the night Sen. JD Vance of Ohio accepted the Republican vice presidential nomination, he also introduced the world to his wife, Usha Chilukuri Vance.
He thanked Usha in his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention in July, calling her "an incredible lawyer and a better mom."
The two met at Yale Law School, where they were both students and took classes together before starting to date. They married in 2014 and have three children, ages 6, 4 and 2.
"The JD I knew then is the same JD you see today — except for that beard," Usha said on the convention stage as she introduced her husband. "His goals in this new role are the same that he has pursued for our family: to keep people safe, to create opportunities, to build a better life and to solve problems with an open mind."
In a campaign ad for Vance’s senatorial campaign in 2022, she called JD “an incredible father” and “my best friend.”
Usha Vance, 38, was raised by Indian immigrant parents in San Diego, according to the Associated Press. She earned her bachelor’s degree from Yale University and her master’s of philosophy from the University of Cambridge through the Gates Cambridge Scholarship.
After graduating from law school, she clerked for Judge Brett Kavanaugh from 2014 to 2015, when he was on the U.S. Court of Appeals, and for U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts from 2017 to 2018.
She became an attorney at the national law firm Munger Tolles & Olson but has reportedly left the firm following Trump's selection of her husband as his running mate.
Usha Vance was a registered Democrat until at least 2014, The New York Times reported.
In an interview with Fox News in June, she said of the possibility of her husband becoming Trump's pick for vice president that she wasn’t “raring to change anything about our lives right now, but I believe in JD and I really love him, and so we’ll just sort of see what happens with our life. We’re open.”
In an early August Fox News appearance — her first solo interview since joining the campaign — she spoke about adjusting to life in the spotlight, saying people should not expect their young kids to have a major presence on the campaign trail.
She also defended her husband's controversial comments about "childless cat ladies" and said she tries to avoid reading negative press coverage about him.
"JD is out there. He's talking about all sorts of things. He's thinking all sorts of things," she said. "And I just think he deserves to have someone in his life who hears that straight from him and doesn't just hear what other people are saying about him all the time."
This reporting originally appeared as part of NPR's live coverage of the Republican National Convention. NPR's Rachel Treisman contributed.
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