The Honorable Tarun Chhabra serves as a Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Technology and National Security on the National Security Council staff. From 2015-2017 he served as NSC Director for Strategic Planning and Director for Human Rights and National Security issues in the Obama Administration. He was a senior fellow at the Center for Security and Emerging Technology in Georgetown University’s Walsh School of Foreign Service and Director of the Project on International Order and Strategy at the Brookings Institution. Chhabra worked at the Pentagon as a speechwriter for two Secretaries of Defense and has been a visiting fellow at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perry World House and a graduate fellow at Harvard University’s Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics. Chhabra also worked in the executive office of the United Nations Secretary-General.
Tarun Chhabra earned a J.D. from Harvard Law School as a Paul and Daisy Soros Fellow for New Americans, an M. Phil. in International Relations from Oxford University (Merton College), where he was a Marshall Scholar, and a B.A. from Stanford University. Chhabra also studied at the Moscow State Institute for International Relations as a Fulbright Scholar. Chhabra was raised in Shreveport, Louisiana and is a first-generation American.