Would bring to the job: Strong background and connections in aviation and highways, as well as finance. She served as administrator of the Federal Aviation Administration, which is the Transportation Department’s largest agency, and spent four years at the Federal Highway Administration, as deputy administrator and then acting administrator.
Is linked to Mr. Obama by: His transition team. Although she supported Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton in the primaries, Mr. Obama appointed her to the transition team for transportation. She has spent much of the last few weeks in borrowed office space on the ninth floor of the F.A.A. headquarters, one floor below her former office.
In her own words: “We cannot regain our innocence we lost on Sept. 11, but we will— we must— regain confidence in the safety of air travel. ... Americans have long known that ‘eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.’ Now, we know, it is the price of mobility.” (At the National Press Club, a month after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001).
Used to work as: Executive vice president at Apco Worldwide, a consulting and public relations firm, and beginning this year, executive director of the infrastructure advisory group at JP Morgan Securities, which arranges private buyouts of public highways and other assets. Those positions followed her five-year term as the first female administrator of the F.A.A. Before coming to Washington, she served as director of Logan International Airport in Boston, and commissioner of the Massachusetts Department of Public Works.
Carries as baggage: Supervision of the Big Dig in Boston, which ballooned in cost. Bush administration officials who followed Ms. Garvey at the F.A.A. criticized her as being too generous in negotiations with the air traffic controllers’ union. And she was the head of the F.A.A., the agency in charge of airline security, at the time of the 9/11 attacks, but was never widely blamed for the failure to foresee the possibility of suicide hijackers.
Biography: Born Feb. 2, 1944, in Brooklyn, but grew up mostly in western Massachusetts. ... holds a B.A. from Mount Saint Mary College and an M.A. from Mount Holyoke College, and completed a fellowship program for public leaders at Harvard. ...sits on numerous corporate boards. ... married to Robert J. Garvey, the sheriff of Hampshire County, in western Massachusetts. ... The couple has two adult children.