Isobel Coleman

Ambassador Isobel Coleman is a foreign policy and global development expert with more than 25 years of experience working in government, the private sector and non-profits. Most recently, she served on the Biden Transition Team, leading the review of the U.S. Mission to the United Nations. From 2014-2017, she was the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations for Management, Reform and Special Political Affairs. During that time, she represented the United States in the UN General Assembly on budgetary matters and in the UN Security Council on Africa and peacekeeping issues. From 2018-2020, she was the Chief Operating Officer of GiveDirectly, an international non-profit tackling poverty by providing unconditional cash transfers to the extreme poor. Previously, Dr. Coleman spent more than a decade as a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations where she directed CFR’s Women and Foreign Policy program and wrote extensively about global development and the advantages of women’s empowerment. Her writings have appeared in many publications, including The Atlantic, Foreign Policy, Foreign Affairs, The New York Times and The Washington Post. She is the author and co-author of numerous books including Pathways to Freedom: Political and Economic Lessons from Democratic Transitions (Council on Foreign Relations, 2013), and Paradise Beneath Her Feet: How Women are Transforming the Middle East (Random House, 2010). She graduated from Princeton University and earned MPhil and DPhil degrees in International Relations from Oxford University, which she attended on a Marshall Scholarship. She started her career at McKinsey & Co. in New York, becoming a partner in the firm’s financial institutions group.