Portal:Delaware/Selected biography/1

Official portrait.

Joseph Robinette "Joe" Biden, Jr. (born 20 November 1942) is an American lawyer and politician from Wilmington, Delaware. He is a member of the Democratic Party and the incumbent senior U.S. Senator from Delaware. Biden is currently serving his sixth term and is sixth-longest serving among current Senators and Delaware's longest-serving Senator. He is the Chairman of the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations in the 110th Congress. Biden has served in that position in the past, and he has served as Chairman of the U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary. He has officially filed as a candidate for the Democratic Party's nomination in the 2008 presidential election.

Biden was born November 20, 1942 in Scranton, Pennsylvania, the son of Joseph R. Biden, Sr. and Catherine Eugenia Finnegan. He was the first of four siblings and was raised in his Irish American mother's Roman Catholic religion.The Biden family moved to Delaware when Biden was 10 years old, and he grew up in suburban New Castle County, Delaware, where his father was a car salesman. In 1961, Biden graduated from Archmere Academy in Claymont, Delaware and, in 1965, from the University of Delaware in Newark, Delaware. He then attended Syracuse University College of Law, graduated in 1968, and was admitted to the Delaware Bar in 1969.