Václav Klaus is president of the Czech Republic, an office he as held since 2003. He previously served as the president of the Parliament/Chamber of Deputies and from 1992 to 1997 was prime minister of Czechoslovakia. Prior to serving as prime minister, President Klaus was the first non-communist finance minister after more than forty years of communist rule. One of the founders of the Czechoslovak Civic Forum Movement (OF), the leading political organization after the Velvet Revolution of 1989, President Klaus was elected its chairman in 1990. After the split of the OF in 1991, he was one of the founders of the Civic Democratic Party, and was elected chairman in April 1991. In March 1996, he was elected vice chairman of the European Democratic Union. He holds honorary doctorates from the Rochester Institute of Technology and U.S. Suffolk University, and has studied in Italy, Prague, and at Cornell University in New York. President Klaus served as a Faculty member of Salzburg Seminar Session 281, 1992: Effect on the World Outside the European Community, 1990; and Session 367, Costs and Benefits of the Free Market System, 1999. President Klaus is accompanied by his wife, Livia Klausová, an alumna of Salzburg Seminar Session 268, World Financial Markets, 1988.