Lyndsay Howard is senior foreign policy advisor to Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and co-architect of the Bloomberg New Economy Forum, and formerly a senior advisor at Kissinger Associates, Inc., in New York. Previously, she was a Distinguished Scholar at the Henry A. Kissinger Center for Global Affairs at Johns Hopkins SAIS and Executive Director of the America and the Future of World Order Project under its Honorary Chairman, Dr. Henry A. Kissinger, with sixteen of America’s leading national security figures. Ms. Howard was general editor for the publication of Dr. Kissinger’s 1950 Harvard senior honors thesis, The Meaning of History: Reflections of Spengler, Toynbee, and Kant. Ms. Howard also conceived and launched the CSIS-Chumir Global Dialogue Commission chaired by Dr. Kissinger, serving as its co-Executive Director with CSIS’ Dr. Michael Green, that assembled twenty-four former presidents, prime ministers, national security advisors and experts from each of the world’s seven continents to discuss challenges and opportunities of the changing world order.

Earlier in her career, Ms. Howard served as a member of the U.S. Intelligence Community for over a decade, and was assigned to American Embassies in Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, as well as Paris, Geneva and Vienna. She was a member of the Intelligence Community Working Group that traced Islamic terrorist activities in Central Asia, Afghanistan and Pakistan. She also worked on Secretary James A. Baker’s staff; for the Legal Advisor to the President for National Security Affairs at the White House; and as special assistant to R. James Woolsey on the U.S. Delegation of the Conventional Forces in Europe Treaty (CFE) negotiation at the OSCE in Vienna. While in government, she received numerous Superior Honor and Achievement awards.

Ms. Howard participated in Project Sapphire, the historic U.S.-Kazakhstan joint effort to remove nuclear materials from Kazakhstan after the end of the Soviet Union; was one of two Western representatives who attended the decommissioning of the Semipalatinsk Soviet nuclear weapons “Polygon” complex; and was a member of the first U.S. government team allowed to visit a formerly secret Soviet nuclear city in Tajikistan. She later led a research team to audit the UN/World Bank/USAID multibillion-dollar cleanup of the Aral Sea in Uzbekistan, working with National Academies of Science of five Central Asian states.

A member of the Council on Foreign Relations, the Trilateral Commission and the International Institute for Strategic Studies, Ms. Howard graduated cum laude from Vassar College’s Science, Technology, and Society program. She studied international relations, history and defense policy at Sciences Po and the Sorbonne in Paris and at the Graduate Institute for International Studies in Geneva. She completed Harvard’s Kennedy School Cybersecurity Executive Program. She speaks fluent French and has studied Turkish, Italian, and Russian.