Profile: Paul Wolfowitz

The World Bank has approved the nomination of US Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz to be its next president, succeeding James Wolfensohn starting from June 1.

Wolfowitz, 61, was nominated earlier this month by US President George W. Bush to be head of the World Bank.

The nomination surprised the international community as Wolfowitz was seen by many as an architect of the Iraq war and his hard-line foreign policy stance has made him a target of critics at home and abroad.

Wolfowitz entered the US Arms Control and Disarmament Agency in 1973, working on the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks and a number of nuclear nonproliferation issues.

From 1977 to 1980, Wolfowitz served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Regional Programs and during the 1981-82 period, he was head of the State Department's Policy Planning Staff.

Under the Ronald Reagan administration, Wolfowitz worked in Jakarta for three years as US ambassador to Indonesia.

From 1989 to 1993, he served as Under Secretary of Defense for Policy in charge of a defense policy team that was responsible to then Defense Secretary Dick Cheney for matters concerning strategy, plans and policy.

In 1994, Wolfowitz became Dean and professor of International Relations at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies of the John Hopkins University.

In February 2001, Wolfowitz was sworn in as the United States' 28th Deputy Secretary of Defense.

Born in New York in December 1943, Wolfowitz received a bachelor's degree from Cornell University in 1965 and later a doctorate in political science from the University of Chicago. He taught at Yale from 1970 to 1973.