US President-elect Joe Biden is continuing the trend of appointing Indian-Americans to top posts in the new administration that boasts of equal representation and represents the cultural diversity of America.
Biden has appointed 3 Indian-Americans – Tarun Chhabra, Sumona Guha and Shanthi Kalathil – to his national security council.
Tarun Chhabra
Chhabra has been appointed as senior director for technology and national security. A first-generation Indian American, born in Tennessee and raised in Louisiana. Chabbra is a graduate of Stanford University, Oxford University, and Harvard Law School.
He is a senior Fellow at the Center for Security and Emerging Technology at Georgetown University and was previously a Fellow with the Project on International Order and Strategy at the Brookings Institution and a Visiting Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perry World House.
During the Obama-Biden administration, Chhabra served on the National Security Council staff as director for strategic planning and director for human rights and national security issues, and at the Pentagon as a speechwriter to the secretary of defense.
Sumona Guha
Guha has been appointed as senior director for South Asia. A graduate of Johns Hopkins and Georgetown University, Guha was co-chair of the South Asia foreign policy working group on the Biden-Harris campaign, and serves on the transition team’s State Department Agency Review Team. She is senior vice president at Albright Stonebridge Group.
Previously, she served in the State Department as a foreign service officer and later, on the Secretary of State’s policy planning staff where she focused on South Asia. During the Obama-Biden administration, she was special advisor for national security affairs to Vice President Biden.
Shanthi Kalathil
Former journalist Kalathil will be coordinator for democracy and human rights. She is currently senior director of the International Forum for Democratic Studies at the National Endowment for Democracy, where her work focuses on emerging challenges to democracy.
Previously, she served as a senior democracy fellow at the US Agency for International Development, an associate with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a Hong Kong-based reporter for the Asian Wall Street Journal, and an advisor to international affairs organizations.
Originally from California, Kalathil is a graduate of the University of California at Berkeley and the London School of Economics and Political Science.