FACTBOX: Who's who on Obama's economic team

(Reuters) - U.S. President-elect Barack Obama on Wednesday named former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker to head a new panel to advise him on stabilizing financial markets and averting a prolonged recession.

He also tapped campaign adviser Austan Goolsbee, an economics professor at the University of Chicago, to be a member of the Council of Economic Advisers and staff director for the committee Volcker will chair.

Following are thumbnail sketches of key members of Obama's economic team:

TIMOTHY GEITHNER TO BE U.S. TREASURY SECRETARY

Timothy Geithner, 47, has been president of the New York Federal Reserve Bank since November 2003, a post that has put him at the heart of the battle to contain the credit crisis.

He was closely involved in the rescue of Citigroup Inc late on Sunday, as well as the bailouts of Bear Stearns and American International Group, and the controversial decision to let Lehman Brothers go bankrupt in September. Panic quickened after that failure and the government was forced to pledge $700 billion of taxpayer money to backstop U.S. banks.

Geithner already has extensive experience at the Treasury, which he joined in 1988 and where he worked his way up to the influential post of under secretary for international affairs. He held this position from 1998 to 2001 under Treasury Secretaries Robert Rubin and Lawrence Summers.

After departing the Treasury Department, Geithner worked at the International Monetary Fund, where he was the director of the Policy Development and Review Department from 2001-03. He has studied Japanese and Chinese, and has lived in East Africa, India, Thailand, China and Japan.

Geithner has a master's degree from Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies.

The position requires Senate confirmation.

LAWRENCE SUMMERS, DIRECTOR, NATIONAL ECONOMIC COUNCIL

Lawrence Summers, 53, an economics professor at Harvard University, served as Treasury secretary between 1999 and 2001. He has been picked to head the National Economic Council, which advises the president on policy and helps coordinate among different government departments and agencies. The position could give him enormous sway over policy.

Summers has a reputation for brilliance, as well as not suffering fools gladly. Obama called him "one of the great economic minds of our time" during a news conference on Monday. "I will rely heavily on his advice as we navigate the uncharted waters of this crisis," Obama said. Summers had been a key Obama economic adviser during the election campaign, and some had thought he might get his old job back at Treasury.

Like Geithner, Summers is a time-tested crisis manager who gained experience helping direct the U.S. response to the Asian financial crisis in the late 1990s as the No. 2 Treasury official under Rubin. Time magazine put Summers, Rubin and Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan on its cover in 1999 as "The Committee to Save the World."

Summers was president of Harvard University between 2001 and 2006. He stepped down amid criticism for remarks about whether innate differences accounted for the fact that more men than women entered science and engineering courses.

He earned a Ph.D. in economics from Harvard in 1982 and taught both there and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He was chief economist at the World Bank between 1991 and 1993.

The position does not require Senate confirmation.

PAUL VOLCKER, CHAIRMAN, ECONOMIC RECOVERY ADVISORY BOARD

Volcker, 81, was Federal Reserve chairman from 1979-1987, and will advise Obama as the chair of a committee of private-sector experts on the economy and financial markets.

Volcker is best known for his decisiveness in ending a devastating inflationary spiral in the late 1970s by raising interest rates to unprecedented levels. The result was a recession in 1981-82 that generated the worst unemployment since the Great Depression of the 1930s.

But Volcker and others have credited that strong medicine with setting the stage for steady growth and a bull market that brought prosperity to millions of Americans.

Volcker has remained active in public service since he headed the Fed, leading investigative panels on a range of financial and humanitarian issues. Among these were a probe of the United Nations oil-for-food program, which diverted funds to Saddam Hussein's government in Iraq. He also led panels that investigated unclaimed Swiss bank accounts of Holocaust victims and probed accounting issues in the collapse of Enron Corp. Some of his recommendations on the latter panel were incorporated into landmark corporate reform legislation.

Volcker became a close adviser to Obama in the latter months of the Illinois senator's campaign as the credit crisis deepened, often appearing at Obama news conferences.

At 6 feet, 8 inches tall, with a booming voice that once moved markets, Volcker cuts an imposing figure and is seen as a counterbalance to Summers and Geithner in White House policy debates.

AUSTAN GOOLSBEE, MEMBER, COUNCIL OF ECONOMIC ADVISERS

Goolsbee, 38, a University of Chicago economics professor and an expert on tax policy and Internet commerce, has served as Obama's chief economic adviser since Obama won his U.S. Senate seat in 2004.

Goolsbee has played a major role in shaping Obama's economic plans, including tax cuts for middle-income Americans and tax increases on those earning over $250,000 a year -- a key difference between Obama and Republican rival John McCain.

He sparked controversy in March after meeting with Canadian officials. A leaked memo suggested Goolsbee played down Obama's opposition to the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). The Obama campaign said the memo was inaccurate.

In August, Goolsbee told Reuters a balanced overhaul of Wall Street regulations was crucial to restoring trust in U.S. financial markets and could be an early priority for Obama.

"If anything, it undermines the innovations when (financial market players) are operating in a totally Wild West environment. We've seen it again and again and when you lose public trust, it's extremely difficult to re-establish it."

Goolsbee holds a Ph.D. in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and bachelor's and masters degrees from Yale University.

Members of the Council of Economic Advisers must be confirmed by the Senate.

PETER ORSZAG, DIRECTOR, OFFICE OF MANAGEMENT AND BUDGET

Orszag, 39, has served for nearly two years as director of the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) and previously worked on the Clinton administration's economic team.

The CBO provides Congress with analysis of economic and budget issues, including the costs associated with proposed spending and tax legislation. Obama has asked Orszag to go through the federal budget "page by page, line by line" to eliminate unneeded programs and make others more cost-effective.

Under Orszag's leadership, the CBO has significantly expanded its focus on issues such as health care, Social Security reform and climate change. In his regular blogs on the CBO Website (cboblog.cbo.gov/), Orszag has suggested that setting more common standards for clinical medical treatment and nutrition programs might improve a range of health outcomes.

Orszag served in the Clinton White House for two years through May 1998. He then spent several years in consulting work in academia before joining the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank, where he directed the Hamilton Project, a group that has been highly critical of the Bush administration's spending and economic policies.

Orszag has a Ph.D. and a master's degree in economics from the London School of Economics. He has lectured at the University of California, Berkeley and was a research professor at Georgetown University.

The head of the Office of Management and Budget must be confirmed by the Senate.

CHRISTINA ROMER, CHAIRMAN, COUNCIL OF ECONOMIC ADVISERS

Christina Romer is an economics professor at the University of California, Berkeley and a member of the National Bureau of Economic Research's business-cycle dating committee, which is the arbiter of U.S. recessions.

Together with her husband, David Romer, she has written widely on the history of the U.S. economy, the causes of the Great Depression and the impact of fiscal policy.

The Romers published three papers this month alone analyzing U.S. tax policy and its effects on the economy and government spending. Obama plans a major fiscal stimulus package to kick-start U.S. growth that he hopes will be enacted once he is inaugurated on January 20, 2009.

The three-member Council of Economic Advisers acts as a policy think-tank within the White House and produces an annual economic report for Congress.

Romer got her Ph.D. at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1985 and taught at Princeton University before moving to Berkeley in 1988, where she has been a professor since 1993.

The position requires Senate confirmation.

(Editing by Jonathan Oatis)