Anna Makanju was a nonresident senior fellow with the Transatlantic Security Initiative. She is a public policy and legal expert working at Facebook, where she leads efforts to ensure election integrity on the platform. Previously, she was the special policy adviser for Europe and Eurasia to former US Vice President Joe Biden, senior policy adviser to Ambassador Samantha Power at the United States Mission to the United Nations, director for Russia at the National Security Council, and the chief of staff for European and NATO Policy in the Office of the Secretary of Defense. She has also taught at the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University and worked as a consultant to a leading company focused on space technologies.

She received her law degree from Stanford University, and her legal career was spent working at the International Criminal Court, the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, on the Third Circuit Court of Appeals as law clerk to Judge Theodore McKee, and in the international arbitration group of Cleary Gottlieb Steen and Hamilton LLP. She was born and spent her childhood in the Soviet Union before immigrating to the United States.