Samantha Vinograd is a nonresident senior fellow with the Forward Defense program in the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security. Previously, she was the assistant secretary for counterterrorism and threat prevention at the US Department of Homeland Security. She was previously a CNN national security analyst, a senior advisor at the Biden Institute at the University of Delaware, and a visiting fellow at the University of Chicago Institute of Politics. She began her career under former US President George W. Bush as the deputy US Treasury attaché to Iraq, and she subsequently served on former US President Barack Obama’s National Security Council as the director for Iraq, director for international economics, and as a senior advisor to the national security advisor. She later joined Goldman Sachs, where her work focused on building public private sector partnerships across a broad range of policy and business issues, and she later led global public policy at Stripe.

Vinograd has been deeply engaged in social impact work and served as an advisor to the US fund for the United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund and to the Concordia Summit. She was a visiting fellow at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton Public Policy Institute, a David E. Rockefeller fellow at the Trilateral Commission, and a Millennium fellow at the Atlantic Council. She was also on the board of the Women’s Foreign Policy Group.

Vinograd has also been published in several outlets including The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Daily Beast, USA Today, Harper’s Bazaar, Politico, and Marie Claire, and previously wrote the Presidential Weekly Briefing column for CNN.

She is fluent in French and studied advanced Arabic and Hebrew. She received her BA in Asian and Middle Eastern studies from the University of Pennsylvania and her MA in security studies from Georgetown University