Salman Ahmed, a Pakistani-American, has been inducted in the Biden administration. Ahmed had previously served as head of strategic planning in Barrack Obama’s National Security Council and is the second Pakistani-American to be included in the President-elect’s administrative team after Ali Zaidi was appointed climate advisor last month.
Ahmed will be part of the Biden foreign policy team where he will serve as the director of policy planning at the US State Department. He has been associated with the US administration for more than a decade, having previously served as the chief of staff of the US Mission to the United Nations and a senior policy advisor to the US Permanent Representative to the UN.
Ahmed has also worked as special assistant to the president and senior director for strategic planning on the National Security Council staff at the White House. He was the co-chair of the International Ceasefire Task Force in Geneva.
Salman Ahmed holds a Bachelors of Science degree in economics from the New York University’s Stern School of Business, in addition to having completed his Master’s degree in international relations from the University of Cambridge.
Before joining the US Department of State and starting a career in state administration in 2009, Ahmed was associated with academia and research. Ahmed served as a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, where he researched into US foreign policy. Previously, he had also served as a visiting professor and research scholar at Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, with a focus on post-conflict reconstruction and peacekeeping.
