Gwen Ifill is moderator and managing editor of "Washington Week" and senior correspondent for "The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer."

The best-selling author of "The Breakthrough: Politics and Race in the Age of Obama," (Doubleday, 2009), she also moderated the Vice Presidential debates during the Presidential elections in 2004 and 2008.

Gwen has covered six Presidential campaigns, and during the 2008 campaign season, brought Washington Week to live audiences around the country as part of a 10-city tour.

Now in its 40th year, Washington Week is the longest-running prime-time news and public affairs program on television. Each week, Gwen brings together some of the best journalists in Washington to discuss the major stories of the week with the reporters who actually cover the news that emanates from the nation’s capital and affects the nation and the world.

Gwen joined both Washington Week and The NewsHour in 1999, interviewing newsmakers and reporting on issues ranging from foreign affairs to politics. Before coming to PBS, she was chief congressional and political correspondent for NBC News, White House correspondent for The New York Times, and a local and national political reporter for The Washington Post. She also reported for the Baltimore Evening Sun and the Boston Herald American.

"I always knew I wanted to be a journalist, and my first love was newspapers," Ifill said. "But public broadcasting provides the best of both worlds-combining the depth of newspapering with the immediate impact of broadcast television."

A native of New York City and a graduate of Simmons College in Boston, Ifill has received more than a dozen honorary doctorates. She has also been honored for her work by the Radio and Television News Directors Association, Harvard’s Joan Shorenstein Center, Ebony Magazine and Boston’s Ford Hall Forum.

She also serves on the boards of the Harvard University Institute of Politics and the Committee to Protect Journalists.