Dan Negrea is a distinguished fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Freedom & Prosperity Center. He founded the center in 2022 and was its first senior director.

He was the State Department’s special representative for commercial and business affairs between 2019 and 2021. In that capacity, he pioneered and led the Deal Team Initiative, a coordination mechanism between US government agencies. The initiative promotes business relations between US and foreign companies around the world.

He was a member of the US Secretary of State’s Policy Planning Staff between 2018 and 2019 where he was responsible for the economic portfolio. He coordinated the Global Entrepreneurship Summit held in The Hague in 2019 that was attended by two thousand participants from government, business, academia, and international organizations.

For three decades before that, he held leadership positions at Wall Street firms. He raised over fifteen billion dollars in financings in the United States and abroad, mostly for middle-market companies.

He defected from Communist Romania where he had been an official in the Ministry of Finance and was involved in negotiating government loans with the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.

He holds an MBA from Cornell University and an MA from the School of International Economic Relations in Bucharest, Romania. He has published extensively on foreign affairs.