Avril Haines is a true pioneer in the field of national security. She currently serves as the first female Deputy National Security Adviser and previously acted as the first female Deputy Director of the CIA, the highest position any woman has reached in the intelligence community. Ms. Haines’s exemplary career includes work as the chief lawyer for the National Security Council and time at the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations and the Office of the Legal Adviser at the State Department. In addition, she clerked for Judge Danny Julian Boggs of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit and, prior to law school, operated an independent bookstore. Ms. Haines is a model to students because “her voice has been among the most important, influential, and respected” in some of the most complex deliberations facing the nation today.

In the words of the HLS community member who nominated Ms. Haines, “For years, her voice has been among the most important, influential, and respected in the U.S. government’s highest-level deliberations on many of the most complicated national security challenges facing the nation.”

Ms. Haines received her B.A. in Physics from the University of Chicago and her J.D. from the Georgetown University Law Center.