Samantha Power

Samantha Power served in the Biden-Harris Administration as the Administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). She has returned to Harvard Law School as the William D. Zabel ’61 Professor of Practice in Human Rights, with a joint appointment at Harvard Kennedy School, where she is the Anna Lindh Professor of the Practice of Global Leadership and Public Policy.

From 2021 to 2025, as Administrator of USAID, the world’s premier bilateral development and humanitarian agency, she helped spearhead the global distribution of more than 700 million free COVID vaccines in developing countries, and she also helped launch a new global campaign to combat lead poisoning (which kills an estimated 1.6 million people annually). During her time at the agency, USAID significantly expanded its private sector partnerships, built a new Office of the Chief Economist, and institutionalized cost-effectiveness analysis in programming and policy decision-making. Under Power’s leadership, USAID invested substantial resources in Ukraine’s agricultural and transportation infrastructure to allow Ukrainians to return their agricultural exports to their pre-2022-invasion totals, contributing to a lowering of global food prices. In addition, USAID mobilized U.S. national security agencies, the private sector, and established democracies behind the “Democracy Delivers” Initiative – an effort to help reformers demonstrate quick and visible economic progress to citizens so as to help sustain support for difficult political and economic reform.

From 2013 to 2017, Power served in the Obama-Biden Administration as the 28th US Permanent Representative to the United Nations. During her time at the UN, Power rallied countries to combat the Ebola epidemic, ratify the Paris climate agreement, and develop new international law to cripple ISIS’s financial networks. She worked to negotiate and implement the ambitious Sustainable Development Goals, helped catalyze bold international commitments to care for refugees, and advocated to secure the release of political prisoners, defend civil society from growing repression, and protect the rights of women and girls.

From 2009 to 2013, Power served on the National Security Council staff as Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Multilateral Affairs and Human Rights. At the NSC, she advised the Obama-Biden Administration on issues such as UN reform, LGBTQ+ and women’s rights, and atrocity prevention. President Obama called her “one of our foremost thinkers on foreign policy,” saying that “she showed us that the international community has a moral responsibility and a profound interest in resolving conflicts and defending human dignity.”

Called by Forbes “a powerful crusader for U.S foreign policy as well as human rights and democracy” when it named her one of the “World’s 100 Most Powerful Women,” Power has been recognized as a leading voice internationally for principled American engagement in the world. She has been named one of Foreign Policy’s “Top 100 Global Thinkers” and has twice been selected as one of Time’s “100 Most Influential People.”

Her book “A Problem from Hell”: America and the Age of Genocide (2002) won the Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction in 2003. Power’s book, The Education of an Idealist: A Memoir (2019), was a New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and USA Today bestseller, and was selected as one of the best books of the year by outlets including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Economist, National Public Radio, Time, Audible, Vanity Fair, and The Christian Science Monitor. Power is also author of the New York Times bestseller Chasing the Flame: One Man’s Fight to Save the World (2008) and co-editor, with Derek Chollet, of The Unquiet American: Richard Holbrooke in the World (2011).

Power began her career as a journalist, reporting from places such as Bosnia, East Timor, Kosovo, Rwanda, Sudan, and Zimbabwe. Before joining the U.S. government, Power was the founding executive director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at the Kennedy School, a columnist for Time, and a National Magazine Award-winning contributor to The Atlantic, The New Yorker, and The New York Review of Books.

Power immigrated to the United States from Ireland at the age of nine. She earned a B.A. from Yale University and a J.D. from Harvard Law School.