Ginger Matchett is a program assistant with the GeoStrategy Initiative in the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security, where focuses on the strategic foresight portfolio, identifying and analyzing future hard- and human security threats, including projects on food and water security, human rights, and US-China competition around the world. Previously, she was a project assistant who supported all three GeoStrategy portfolios of strategy, foresight, and national security resilience.

Before GeoStrategy, served as a young global professional with the Forward Defense initiative’s 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, transatlantic affairs, and NATO issues. She also completed research assistant positions focusing on European and African geoeconomic security at the National Defense University, and on European security and defense policy at the European Parliament. She also interned on 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 around the world and the 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.