Julia Nesheiwat is a distinguished fellow with the Atlantic Council’s Global Energy Center. Since December 2020, she has served as commissioner on the US Arctic Research Commission, reporting to the White House and Congress on domestic and international Arctic issues. 

Nesheiwat has more than twenty years of experience of government service. She worked on international energy diplomacy, critical infrastructure protection, defense, environmental science, and national security in the Bush, Obama, and Trump administrations. From July 2019 to February 2020, she served as Florida’s first chief resilience officer, launching a new office dedicated to addressing the environmental, physical, and economic impacts of climate and emergency preparedness for the state. From February 2020 to January 2021, Nesheiwat served as the deputy assistant to the president for Homeland Security and Resilience. From 2011 to 2014, she served as deputy assistant secretary of state, where she worked to build the first Energy Resources Bureau at the Department of State. Nesheiwat also served as chief of staff for policy and planning at the Director of National Intelligence, acting and deputy special presidential envoy for hostage affairs, senior advisor to US Special Envoy for Eurasian Energy, as well as the undersecretary for energy, environment, and business.

Nesheiwat served on the World Economic Forum’s Global Advisory Council on energy security and was an international affairs fellow with the Council on Foreign Relations. She was also a visiting professor at the Naval Post Graduate School on Energy Security and has lectured at Stanford University and the University of California San Diego. Nesheiwat’s PhD dissertation from Tokyo Tech, “Post-Disaster Reconstruction in Energy Policy and Resiliency,” focused on post-disaster reconstruction of coastal towns suffering from lack of power, flooding, and rising sea levels. She is a US Army combat veteran.