When Usha Vance took to the stage at the Republican National Convention Wednesday night, she told the crowd about the “most determined person I know” her husband, the newly selected vice-presidential candidate JD Vance.

“That JD and I could meet at all, let alone fall in love and marry, is a testament to this great country,” she told the crowd.

Mrs Vance humanized the Ohio senator and running mate of Republican White House candidate Donald Trump by describing him as a man who longed for a “tight-knit family”.

As she introduced her husband, she told thousands of onlookers more about her “meat and potatoes kind of guy” – a man who adapted to her vegetarian diet and learned how to cook Indian food for her mother.

While she does not seek out the political spotlight, Mrs Vance, 38, wields considerable influence over her husband’s career, he has said.

And it is the stellar CV of his wife that leaves Mr Vance feeling “humbled” he has said.

As he took the stage at the Republican convention, Mr Vance echoed previous praise he’s made about his wife being a “incredible lawyer and a better mom”.

In an interview on Fox News last month, she said: “I believe in JD, and I really love him, and so we’ll just sort of see what happens with our life.”

On Wednesday, she echoed that sentiment: “Neither JD nor I expected to find ourselves in this position”.

The two met as students at Yale Law School in 2013, when they joined a discussion group on “social decline in white America”, according to the New York Times.

The content influenced Mr Vance’s best-selling 2016 memoir Hillbilly Elegy, about his childhood in the white working-class Rust Belt, which became a 2020 movie directed by Ron Howard.

Mr Vance, 39, has said he considered her his “Yale spirit guide” when they were classmates at the elite university.

Mrs Vance previously graduated with a BA in history from Yale University and was also a Gates Scholar at Cambridge University, where she came away with an MPhil in early modern history, according to her LinkedIn profile.

The couple wed in 2014 and have three children: two sons, Ewan and Vivek, and a daughter, Mirabel.

Mrs Vance – née Chilukuri, the child of Indian immigrants – was born and raised in the suburbs of San Diego, California.

Her husband regularly rails about “woke” ideas he says are pushed by Democrats, but his wife was formerly a registered Democrat and is now a corporate litigator at a San Francisco law firm which proudly touts its reputation for being “radically progressive”.

Mrs Vance once clerked for Brett Kavanaugh, now a Supreme Court justice, on the District of Columbia court of appeals. Then she clerked for Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts. Both men are part of the highest court’s conservative majority.

“Usha definitely brings me back to Earth a little bit,” Mr Vance told the Megyn Kelly Show podcast in 2020. “And if I maybe get a little bit too cocky or a little too proud I just remind myself that she is way more accomplished than I am.”

“People don’t realise just how brilliant she is,” he added, saying she is able to digest a 1,000-page book in only a few hours.

She is the “powerful female voice on his left shoulder”, giving him guidance, he said.

As Mr Vance gears up for what is certain to be a gruelling campaign for the White House, he may need her counsel more than ever before.