HON. PATTI B. SARIS has been a U.S. district judge of the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts since January 1994. She was born in Boston and has resided in the Boston area for most of her life. She is a graduate of the Girls’ Latin School, Radcliffe College (1973, magna cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa), and Harvard Law School (1976, cum laude). After graduating from law school, Judge Saris clerked for the Honorable Robert Braucher, justice of the Supreme Judicial Court, and then worked as a litigation associate at Foley, Hoag & Eliot in Boston. When Senator Edward M. Kennedy became chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, she moved to Washington, D.C., and worked as staff counsel on regulatory reform legislation and other matters. In 1982, after a brief return to private practice, Judge Saris became an assistant U.S. attorney, and eventually chief of the civil division. In 1986, she became a U.S. magistrate judge, and in 1989, she was appointed as an associate justice of the Massachusetts Superior Court, where she presided over civil and criminal trials. In 1994, Judge Saris was appointed to the U.S. District Court. Among other awards, she has received the Haskell Cohn Award for Distinguished Judicial Service from the Boston Bar Association (BBA), and she has since won the BBA’s Award for Judicial Excellence. Judge Saris is active on various committees. She was appointed to the defender services committee of the Judicial Conference, which deals with indigent criminal representation in the federal courts, and completed her service in October 2005. She was president of the Harvard Board of Overseers. Judge Saris is also the liaison to the federal courts’ education project, which educates schoolchildren about the courts. She has coauthored various publications, including Congress: The First Branch of Government (with the Honorable Abner Mikva). She is currently chair of the U.S. Sentencing Commission.  (April 2011)