WASHINGTON – In the early 1970s, when college for many meant antiwar protests and experimenting with recreational drugs, friends say Ben S. Bernanke was busy at Harvard and MIT trying to figure out the monetary causes of the Great Depression.

Now the shy, bearded, 51-year-old academic is President Bush’s nominee for chairman of the Federal Reserve, anointed successor to celebrated central banker and cultural icon Alan Greenspan.

The public will get its first extended look at the little-known Mr. Bernanke this week, when he sits for questions from members of the Senate Banking Committee at his one-day confirmation hearing. If confirmed, Mr. Bernanke will take over the Fed at a moment of rising economic unease. The trade and budget deficits are soaring. The once-blistering housing market may be cooling. Rumors continue to rumble through Wall Street of dangerously overextended hedge funds ripe for collapse. The next Fed chairman could face significant challenges, as Mr. Greenspan did, within months of taking office.

Mr. Bernanke’s friends, colleagues, and former students say the would-be Fed chairman is likely to come across in the hearing as anything but a starchy academic wedded to arcane theories and rigid economic models.

Instead, they describe Mr. Bernanke as a supple thinker and a deceptively shrewd politician with a deadpan wit, a deeply calming bedside manner, and no strident political or economic ideology.

Those traits came in handy during his years as chairman of Princeton University’s economics department. Mr. Bernanke took over a bickering department in 1996 and turned it into a smoothly running machine now often mentioned as one of the top two or three in the nation. Colleagues said Mr. Bernanke always knew where each faculty member stood on any issue before a department meeting, something also said to be true of Mr. Greenspan at the Fed, an institution that seeks to operate by consensus.

Yet, while reminiscing about his years as department head, Mr. Bernanke did not take the position – or himself – too seriously. “I served seven years as the chair of the Princeton economics department,” Mr. Bernanke recalled in a January speech, “where I had responsibility for major policy decisions, such as whether to serve bagels or doughnuts at the department coffee hour.”

Ben Shalom Bernanke was born December 13, 1953, in Augusta, Ga., and grew up in Dillon, S.C., a small farming and furniture manufacturing community just over the North Carolina border. His mother, Edna, was a substitute teacher. His father, Philip, was a pharmacist at the Jay Bee Drug Co., a store founded by Philip’s father, Jonas, who moved to South Carolina from New York in search of a quieter life.

Edna Bernanke said she noticed early that her eldest son had a knack for numbers and an apparent fondness for currency. “We came home one time, and he was playing with pennies with someone,” Mrs. Bernanke said of her 3-year old son. “He could add and subtract. You’d say, ‘What if I had nine pennies and I take away three?’ and he’d tell you right away.”

Mr. Bernanke won the state spelling bee at 11, demonstrating the gentle persuasion that friends say he will bring to the Fed. At the state competition, Mr. Bernanke was told he misspelled a word. He left the stage. But he was sure he was right. “He came back on stage and said he’d spelled it correctly,” Edna Bernanke said. “And he was right.”

In high school, Mr. Bernanke scored 1,590 on his SAT, a near-perfect score. He taught himself calculus as a senior because his school did not offer the course, and he became a speed reader. But Mr. Bernanke didn’t spend all his time in the library – his high school afternoons were divided between band practice (he played the saxophone, as did Mr. Greenspan) or shooting hoops with friends in his backyard. The schools in Dillon were just starting to integrate, and the young Bernanke drafted a novel about top white and black football players coming together to form a team at a new high school.

Kenneth Manning, a friend a few years older than Mr. Bernanke, won a scholarship to Harvard University. Mr. Manning, now a science professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, lobbied Mr. Bernanke’s parents to let their son join him in Cambridge. Mr. Manning spent hours convincing Edna and Philip Bernanke that Ben would not get swept up in turbulent campus protests or lose his connection to Judaism.

Mr. Bernanke did not become an activist when he arrived at Harvard in 1971, just a voracious student, said Mr. Manning. Mr. Bernanke also worked a variety of jobs during his college breaks, including one summer as a waiter at South of the Border, the sprawling cathedral of kitsch just off I-95 in South Carolina, famous for endless billboard advertisements featuring sombrero clad cartoon pitchman “Pedro.”

Mr. Bernanke considered English and mathematics as majors at Harvard before turning to economics. Friends say the fact that Mr. Bernanke considered majoring in English reflects his love of language, a skill not always associated with the often opaque Mr. Greenspan.

“Greenspan’s been head of the Fed so long that the markets have gotten to sort of understand the language. They speak Greenspanese,” said professor Alan Blinder, a former Fed vice chairman and frequent lunch partner of Mr. Bernanke’s at Princeton’s economics department. “Oddly enough, while Bernanke will speak English, which is a much more commonly understood language, I think the markets are going to have some adjusting to do when the English starts coming out.”

As a graduate student at MIT, Mr. Bernanke probed the roots of the Depression, studying the Fed’s role and what he viewed as its failure to fight a dangerous downward spiral in prices.

After MIT, Mr. Bernanke moved to California with his new wife, Anna, and his MIT colleague Jeremy Bulow. Mr. Bulow and Mr. Bernanke taught at Stanford University while Anna, now a Spanish instructor at the National Cathedral School here, studied for her master’s. The three lived in a rented house with another economist, Mark Gertler, a close friend of Mr. Bernanke’s and now a professor at New York University. Anna Bernanke did the cooking. None of them had any money.

“I lent him $500,and he really did not like being in debt,” Mr. Bulow recalled of their first year in California. “I think he paid me back by the second paycheck, which is maybe a good characteristic for someone running the Fed.”

Friends and colleagues say that unlike Mr. Greenspan, Mr. Bernanke will probably not be a fixture on the Washington social circuit, preferring quiet nights at home and small gatherings of friends and family. But they say he is not so introverted that he will fail to develop relationships with key members of Congress and at the White House.