Rand Paul

Name at birth: Randal Howard Paul

Dr. Randal "Rand" Paul is the Kentucky ophthalmologist who was first elected to the United States Senate from that state in 2010. Rand Paul was born in Pennsylvania and grew up in Texas, where his father, Dr. Ron Paul, was a politically active physician who served in the United States Congress and ran for the presidency three times. Rand Paul earned his undergraduate degree from Baylor University in 1984, and his medical degree from the Duke University School of Medicine in 1988. He practiced ophthalmology in Bowling Green, Kentucky from 1993 until his election to the Senate, all the while being an active anti-tax organizer in regional politics. Rand Paul became nationally known when he helped his father on the presidential campaign trail in 2008. A conservative Republican with libertarian goals, Rand seized the opportunity to run for the junior Senate seat vacated by Jim Bunning, and in 2010 he won, promising to never raise taxes and to push for "less government." He aligned himself with the Tea Party wing of the Republican Party, and the 2012 re-election of President Barack Obama put Paul in the spotlight as a conservative alternative in matters of national debt and foreign policy. In April of 2015 he announced that he would be a candidate for president in 2016, saying he was “running for President of the United States of America because I want to defeat the Washington machine." He ended his presidential campaign on February 3, 2016, after a fifth-place finish in the Iowa caucuses. Paul was then re-elected to the U.S. Senate in 2016.