New Delhi: Yahoo picked Google's Marissa Mayer to become its new CEO, turning to an engineer with established Silicon Valley credentials to turn around the struggling former Internet powerhouse.
Mayer, 37, will assume her role on Tuesday, when the company is scheduled to report its quarterly financial results. On Monday, she tweeted that she was "incredibly excited" to be embarking on her new role.
Mayer Google's 20th employee and first female engineer, and has led various businesses there, including the design of the company's flagship search engine.
Her hiring signaled the Internet company is likely to renew its focus on Web technology and products rather than beefing up online content. Mayer, who was instrumental in the birth of a major technological innovation - Google's search engine - joins the exceedingly thin ranks of female Silicon Valley CEOs.
Last responsible for Google's local and location services, she joins fellow women tech-industry corporate chieftains Meg Whitman of Hewlett Packard, Virginia Rometty of International Business Machines and Ursula Burns of Xerox.
Mayer's ascension comes as her profile at Google appeared to have diminished in recent months. Shortly after Larry Page took over the helm from Eric Schmidt, she was excluded from a group of top executives reporting directly to the CEO and granted oversight over major strategic decisions.
Marissa Mayer's appointment caps a tumultuous year at Yahoo. In May, Scott Thompson resigned as CEO after less than 6 months on the job as a controversy flared up over his academic credentials.
Mayer, who edged out front-runner and acting Chief Executive Ross Levinsohn, starts as Yahoo's third CEO in a year. She hopes to stem losses to Google and Facebook - which her high-profile predecessors failed to do.
Marissa Mayer was most recently Vice President of Local, Maps, and Location Services at Google where she oversaw product management, engineering, design and strategy for the company's suite of local and geographical products, including Google Maps, Google Earth, Zagat, Street View, and local search, for desktop and mobile. She also curated the Google Doodle program, celebrating special events on Google's homepage around the world.
During her 13 years at Google, Marissa held numerous positions, including engineer, designer, product manager, and executive, and launched more than 100 well-known features and products. She played an instrumental role in Google search, leading the product management effort for more than 10 years, a period during which Google Search grew from a few hundred thousand to well over a billion searches per day.
Marissa led the development of some of Google's most successful services including image, book and product search, toolbar, and iGoogle, and defined such pivotal products as Google News and Gmail. She is listed as an inventor on several patents in artificial intelligence and interface design.
Joining as the company's first female engineer in 1999, Marissa played an important role in developing Google's culture. Her contributions included overseeing the look-and-feel of the company's iconic homepage and founding the Associate Product Manager program, which has hired over 300 of the company's future leaders and is considered the industry's ideal standard in transforming new computer science graduates into executive leaders.
Prior to joining Google, Marissa worked at the UBS research lab in Zurich, Switzerland and at SRI International in Menlo Park, California. She graduated with honours from Stanford University with a BS in Symbolic Systems and a MS in Computer Science. For both degrees, she specialised in artificial intelligence. While at Stanford, she taught computer programming to more than 3000 students and received the Centennial Teaching and Forsythe Awards for her contributions to undergraduate education. In 2008, the Illinois Institute of Technology awarded her an honorary doctorate of engineering.
She has been honoured with the Matrix Award by the New York Women in Communications, as a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum, and as "Woman of the Year" by Glamour magazine. For four years running, Fortune has named her one of the 50 Most Powerful Women in Business, including when at age 33 she was the youngest woman ever included on the list.
Marissa serves on the board of directors of Wal-Mart Stores. She is also on the board of various non-profits, including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the San Francisco Ballet, and the New York City Ballet.
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