Julia Groeblacher is a Millennium fellow at the Atlantic Council and currently serves as a special assistant to US Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman. Here, Groeblacher is the deputy’s advisor on a broad portfolio covering the Middle East, counterterrorism, cybersecurity, emerging technologies, and space. Prior to this assignment, Groeblacher served in Afghanistan, as the US embassy’s liaison to the Afghan military and the NATO military mission, and as the US embassy’s coordinator with the United Nations assistance mission for Afghanistan’s 2018 parliamentary and 2019 presidential elections. She also served at the US embassy in Moscow as the liaison on human-rights issues following the Russian invasion of Crimea and was responsible for human-rights reporting on Syria at the outset of the Syrian war. Groeblacher received her BA in political science, economics, and Arabic from the University of Kansas and her master’s in public policy from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. She is originally from Austria and speaks German, Russian, and Arabic.