Rose Jackson is an entrepreneur and former diplomat with 15+ years of experience strengthening democracy and defending human rights, leveraging technology for social impact, and building institutions to support democratic activists around the world. Jackson is currently the director of the Democracy + Tech Initiative at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab. She previously founded and served as CEO of Beacon, a platform leveraging data and marketing technology to make it easier for people to take meaningful civic and political action.

Prior to founding her company, Jackson served as a senior policy adviser at the Open Society Foundations (OSF) where she led a presidential transition initiative focused on reforming U.S. support to foreign military and police. During the Obama Administration, Jackson served as the chief of staff to the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor at the State Department, and before that as an advisor to Senator Chris Coons on foreign policy and national security issues as a Galloway Fellow.

Jackson has consulted and worked for a wide range of campaigns, governments and party organizations both in the United States and abroad. Internationally, with the National Democratic Institute, she advised parties, parliaments, and civil society organizations in East and Southern Africa. Jackson also served as a Benghazi-based adviser and political analyst to the International Organization for Migration during the Libyan uprising in 2011.

Jackson completed her master’s in International Relations as a Rotary Scholar in Kenya and earned her bachelor’s in International Relations and Economics at Wheaton College in Massachusetts. She is a Truman National Security Project fellow, term member of the Council on Foreign Relations, research fellow at the Stanford Handa Center for Human Rights, and a prior Center for New American Security NextGen fellow.