Ginger Matchett

Ginger Matchett is an assistant director with the GeoStrategy Initiative in the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security, where she focuses on the strategic foresight portfolio assessing trends, opportunities, and security threats shaping the future around the world. She works on global environmental, food, and water security, the impacts of climate change on security and defense, human rights, and US-China competition. She contributes to and helps lead the annual Global Foresight report series, as well as manages the portfolio’s research, events, operations, and business development. Her writing and commentary have appeared in CNN, ABC News, War on the Rocks, MIT Technology Review, The Economic Times, AFP, France 24, Arab News, Agencia EFE, the Express Tribune, and Noticias Uno.

Before GeoStrategy, she served as a young global professional with the Forward Defense initiative’s US defense strategy and military operations portfolio, also part of the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center. Matchett was previously a project assistant and intern with the Transatlantic Defense and Security Program at the Center for European Policy Analysis, where she worked on European security and defense, Russia’s war on Ukraine, and NATO operations. She also completed research assistant positions focusing on European and African geoeconomic security at the National Defense University, and on EU security and defense policy at European Parliament. She also interned with the Europe portfolio of government relations at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, events and programs at the Women’s Foreign Policy Group, public diplomacy marketing at the Czech embassy in Washington, DC, and global communications at She Saves A Nation. 

She graduated magna cum laude with a bachelor’s degree in international studies from American University’s School of International Service, concentrating in global security, conflict, peace, and governance. She had a primary regional focus of Europe and Eurasia and a secondary of Sub-Saharan Africa. For her senior capstone, she conducted extensive research for the US Department of State’s Office of Global Criminal Justice on the nexus between climate change, conflict, and mass atrocities. Through her university, she also conducted qualitative ethnographic research on the women, peace, and security agenda, discourse of women’s health, and international development in Sub-Saharan Africa. 

Speaking German and French, she studied abroad in Belgium with American University’s European Union in Action program and in Germany with the US Department of State’s Congress-Bundestag Youth Exchange scholarship program.