Juliette Kayyem

Juliette Kayyem presently serves at a Senior Fellow and Faculty Affiliate at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government. For the last two years, she has directed the Kennedy School’s domestic preparedness program, one of the preeminent programs focused on America’s response to the terror attacks of 2001. Before that, she served as a legal advisory to then Attorney General Janet Reno at the Department of Justice until she was appointed, in 1999, to the National Commission on Terrorism by the Minority Leader Richard Gephardt. One of the few Arab-American voices within the national security community, she is a committed advocate for fair homeland security and counterterrorism policies. In 2002, she was named by the Boston Phoenix as “a Hero for our Times.” Her work appears in numerous journals and newspapers, and she is co-editor of The First to Arrive: State and Local Responses to Terror (MIT Press). She also serves as a national security analyst for NBC News. She is a graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Law School.