The Aspen Institute

Ambassador Susan E. Rice was Domestic Policy Advisor to President Joe Biden as well as President Obama’s National Security Advisor, U.S. Permanent Representative to the United Nations, and a member of the Cabinet. During the Clinton administration, Ambassador Rice was U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs, as well as Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for African Affairs and Director for International Organizations and Peacekeeping at the National Security Council. Ambassador Rice began her career as a management consultant and worked for several years at the Brookings Institution as a Senior Fellow. In 2024, Ambassador Rice is the Bernard and Susan Liautaud Visiting Fellow at Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institute and a Distinguished Visiting Fellow at Stanford’s Institute for Human- Centered Artificial Intelligence. The author of The New York Times bestselling 2019 memoir, Tough Love: My Story of the Things Worth Fighting For, Ambassador Rice was previously a contributing opinion writer for The New York Times, Distinguished Visiting Research Fellow at American University, Visiting Senior Fellow at Harvard Kennedy School of Government’s Belfer Center, and Visiting Fellow at the Harvard Institute of Politics. She is a Director on the Board of Netflix, having served previously from 2018-2021. Ambassador Rice received her B.A. in history from Stanford University and her master’s degree and doctorate in international relations from Oxford University, where she was a Rhodes Scholar. A native of Washington, DC, she is married and has two grown children.