Melanie Hart is the senior director of the Atlantic Council’s Global China Hub. She leads the Hub’s efforts to analyze Beijing’s actions and their global impacts using rigorous analysis and innovative data to generate actionable policy solutions, enabling the United States and its allies to respond effectively to common policy challenges on China. In this role, she leverages the Hub’s network of China policy experts around the world as well as the Atlantic Council’s work on China across its sixteen programs and centers.    

Prior joining the Council, Hart worked at the US Department of State, where she served as senior advisor for China in the Office of the Undersecretary for Economic Growth, Energy, and the Environment. In that role, Hart was instrumental in crafting strategies to reduce nation-state vulnerabilities to Chinese pressure. She developed the Department of State’s playbook for responding to Chinese economic coercion and led an internal unit that provided coercion-response support to multiple nations. Hart developed the State Department’s semiconductor strategy for the CHIPS and Science Act’s International Technology Security and Innovation Fund. She also served as policy lead for the US-Taiwan Economic Prosperity Partnership Dialogue and worked with multiple US allies and partners to address common China policy challenges.    

Before joining the State Department, Hart served as senior fellow and director for China policy at the Center for American Progress, where her work helped shape domestic and global approaches to China on issues such as 5G policy, economic competition, energy and climate policy, and global governance. She also served as a senior advisor at the Scowcroft Group, where she helped US firms understand China’s industrial policies.  

Hart has a PhD in political science from the University of California, San Diego and a BA from Texas A&M University.