Janet Napolitano was born on November 29, 1957, in New York City. She is the daughter of Jane Marie (née Winer) and Leonard Michael Napolitano, who was the dean of the University of New Mexico School of Medicine. Her father was of Italian ancestry and her mother had German and Austrian ancestry. Napolitano is a Methodist. She was the eldest of three children; she has a younger brother and sister. She was raised in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and Albuquerque, New Mexico, where she graduated from Sandia High School in Albuquerque in 1975 and was voted Most Likely to Succeed. She graduated from Santa Clara University in Santa Clara, California, where she won a Truman Scholarship, and was valedictorian. In 1978, she studied for a term at the London School of Economics as part of Santa Clara's exchange programme through IES Abroad. She then received her Juris Doctor (J.D.) from the University of Virginia School of Law. After law school she served as a law clerk for Judge Mary M. Schroeder of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, and then joined Schroeder's former firm, Lewis and Roca located in Phoenix.