Shanthi Kalathil is founder and principal at MDO Advisors, which helps organizations plan for geopolitical risk, become more resilient and achieve greater impact in an era of strategic and technological competition. Under President Biden, Kalathil served as Deputy Assistant to the President and Coordinator for Democracy and Human Rights at the National Security Council, where she stood up a new directorate and was the top NSC official coordinating US policy on democratic renewal, resilience and human rights. In this capacity, she oversaw the organization of the inaugural Summit for Democracy and the development of the first U.S. Strategy on Countering Corruption, among other initiatives. Prior to joining the administration, Kalathil was also a national security policy advisor on the Biden-Harris Transition team. She was formerly the senior director of the National Endowment for Democracy’s International Forum for Democratic Studies, a leading think tank exploring such emerging challenges to democracy as digital authoritarianism, foreign interference, disinformation and kleptocracy. Previously, she held positions at the US Agency for International Development and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and consulted for the World Bank and other international affairs organizations. A former Hong Kong-based reporter for the Asian Wall Street Journal, Kalathil has also authored and edited numerous policy and scholarly publications on the role of information and technology in international affairs, including Diplomacy, Development and Security in the Information Age (Institute for the Study of Diplomacy, Georgetown University, 2013); Developing Independent Media as an Institution of Accountable Governance (The World Bank, 2011); and (with Taylor C. Boas) Open Networks, Closed Regimes: The Impact of the Internet on Authoritarian Rule (Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2003), which was cited by Foreign Policy as one of “Ten Books To Learn How Technology Shapes the World.” She sits on the boards of Radio Free Asia and the National Democratic Institute, and holds degrees from the University of California at Berkeley and the London School of Economics and Political Science.