Laura Holgate, the previous U.S. ambassador to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and the Vienna, Austria, Office of the United Nations, has joined the Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs as a non-resident senior fellow.
Holgate began her service in Vienna last year, returning to the United States in January upon the end of former President Barack Obama’s term. Her nomination had been blocked for months due to political disagreements over the Iran nuclear deal. She was eventually confirmed last May and arrived in July.
Holgate has now been tapped to lead a new initiative at the Belfer Center, an international security, diplomacy, and science policy think tank that will examine the role of multilateral institutions – such as the IAEA – in reducing the threats posed by nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons and materials.
Holgate previously served in the Obama administration as special assistant to the president and senior director for weapons of mass destruction terrorism and threat reduction on the National Security Council. She worked with the Belfer Center in the early 1990s, contributing to its work on the Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction program, which had just launched to secure weapons of mass destruction and materials from the former Soviet Union. She later moved to the Pentagon to direct the Nunn-Lugar program.
Holgate will appear at ExchangeMonitor Publications and Forums’ annual Nuclear Deterrence Summit next week, where she will speak alongside other Obama administration officials, congressional staffers, and experts on the state of U.S.-Russian relations and international nuclear security and arms control efforts.
