Derek Chollet served on the National Security Council Staff at the White House, where he was Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Strategic Planning. From 2009-2011, he served as the Principal Deputy Director of the Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s Policy Planning Staff. Prior to joining the State Department, Chollet was a Senior Fellow at the Center for a New American Security (CNAS), a non-resident fellow in the Brookings Institution’s Global Economy and Development Program and an adjunct associate professor at Georgetown University. During the Clinton administration, he served as Chief Speechwriter for US Ambassador to the United Nations Richard Holbrooke, and Special Adviser to Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott. He was foreign policy adviser to Senator John Edwards (D-N.C.), both on his legislative staff and during the 2004 Kerry/Edwards presidential campaign. Chollet has also been a Fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) and a visiting scholar and adjunct professor at The George Washington University. He is the author, co-author or coeditor of five books on American foreign policy, including The Road to the Dayton Accords: A Study of American Statecraft (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005) and America Between the Wars: From 11/9 to 9/11, coauthored with James Goldgeier (PublicAffairs, 2008), and his commentaries and reviews on US foreign policy and politics have appeared in many other books and publications.

Educated at Cornell and Columbia, Chollet was raised in Lincoln, Nebraska.