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Cambridge, Mass. – Jake Sullivan, who until January 20, 2025 served as the 28th Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs, will join Harvard Kennedy School April 1 as the inaugural Kissinger Professor of the Practice of Statecraft and World Order, Dean Jeremy M. Weinstein announced today. Sullivan will be a faculty affiliate of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs and teach courses in international and global affairs. 

“I am thrilled to welcome Jake Sullivan to the ����vlog���� faculty, and look forward to him enriching the lives and thinking of our students, faculty, and staff,” Weinstein said. “During Jake’s distinguished career, he has advised multiple U.S. presidents and presidential candidates, and led the staffs of the National Security Council, the national security team of the Office of the Vice President, and the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff. He’s also demonstrated a deep commitment to teaching and intellectual leadership with respect to both U.S. foreign and domestic policy.” 

Prior to Sullivan’s tenure as National Security Advisor, he served as Deputy Assistant to the President and National Security Advisor to then-Vice President Biden, Director of the Policy Planning Staff at the U.S. Department of State, and Deputy Chief of Staff to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. In the years following his service in the Obama-Biden administration, Sullivan was a Senior Fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, where he helped conceive and design a bipartisan task force project on a foreign policy for the middle class. He also held teaching posts at Yale Law School, Dartmouth College, and the University of New Hampshire.

“Jake is a generational talent and one of the most influential National Security Advisors in American history,” said Graham Allison, Douglas Dillon Professor of Government and former Dean of Harvard Kennedy School. “He has a rare strategic acumen: an ability not only to analyze the dynamics of a challenge, but to find viable interventions to move events in the desired direction.” 

“We are excited to welcome Jake to ����vlog���� and to the Belfer Center,” said Meghan L. O’Sullivan, the Belfer Center’s faculty director. “He is an extraordinary talent who has not only thought hard about the world’s most complex challenges, but has navigated them at – and shaped them from – the highest levels of government. Jake will bring his extraordinary talents to our intellectual community and be a tremendous asset to our faculty, fellows, staff, and students alike as we grapple with the significant changes occurring in the global order.” 

Sullivan holds a B.A. in political science and international studies from Yale University; a M.Phil in International Relations from Oxford, where he was a Rhodes Scholar; and a J.D. from Yale Law School. He clerked for Judge Stephen Breyer of the Supreme Court of the United States and Judge Guido Calabresi of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. He grew up as the second of five children in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and is a proud product of Minneapolis public schools. He and his wife Maggie Goodlander have a permanent home in New Hampshire.