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Jenkins

Bonnie

Ambassador Bonnie Jenkins is the founder and executive director of the Women of Color Advancing Peace, Security and Conflict Transformation (WCAPS), a nonprofit organization established in 2017. She is also the chair of the Committee on Radioactive Sources: Applications and Alternative Technologies of the National Academies of Sciences.

Jenkins is a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a senior fellow at the Humphrey School of Public Affairs, and an adjunct professor at the Georgetown University School of Foreign Service and the Georgetown University Law Center. She is also a professorial lecturer at the George Washington Elliott School of International Affairs and the University of Virginia Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy. She was a visiting scholar at the School of Veterinary Sciences and the School of Nursing at the University of Pennsylvania and lecturer at the University of Texas at Austin.

In 2017, Jenkins was a visiting fellow at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perry World House. From 2009 to 2017, she was an ambassador at the U.S. Department of State, where she served as coordinator for threat reduction programs in the Bureau of International Security and Nonproliferation. She served as the U.S. representative to the 30-nation G-7 Global Partnership Against the Spread of Weapons and Materials of Mass Destruction and chaired the Global Partnership in 2012. Jenkins was the Department of State’s lead to the four Nuclear Security Summits that took place from 2010 to 2016.

Jenkins was also part of the U.S. government interagency team that established and launched the Global Health Security Agenda (GHSA), the global effort to build country capacities to prevent, detect and respond to infectious disease. In addition to leading diplomatic efforts on the GHSA, she was the United States government lead in engaging the nongovernmental sector in furtherance of the GHSA. During this time, Jenkins established the GHSA Next Generation Network and the GHSA Consortium..

Jenkins is a retired Naval Reserves officer. She was a fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs (Belfer) at Harvard University. During that time, Jenkins also worked at the Bernard Koteen Office of Public Interest Advising at Harvard Law School. Jenkins holds a doctorate from the University of Virginia; a Master of Laws from Georgetown University; a Master of Public Administration from the State University of New York at Albany; a Juris Doctor from Albany Law School; and a bachelor’s from Amherst College.

She is a member of the New York State Bar and leads the American Bar Association’s Women in National Security Law Initiative.

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