SW Alumni Jake Sullivan Deptuy Chief of Staff to Secretary of State



Jake Sullivan, Southwest Graduate and
currently Director of Policy Planning at the United States Department of State
and Deputy Chief of Staff to Secretary of State Clinton 

 Information provided by Eric Schwartz, Dead of Humphrey School
On October 26, Jake Sullivan, State Department Director of Policy Planning and Deputy Chief of Staff to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, will speak at the Humphrey School on “American Leadership in the 21st Century.” Sullivan, a Minnesota native, has been deeply involved in all of the major national security issues confronting the United States over the past four years, from the Middle East and South Asia to Africa, the Americas, East Asia and the Pacific.

Eric Schwartz, Dean of the Humphrey School, served at the State Department with Sullivan between 2009 and 2011, and commented on Sullivan’s role: “As both the director of the key foreign policy planning office at the Department of State and one of the Secretary of State’s closest personal advisers, Jake Sullivan has played an extraordinarily important and influential role in both the development and implementation of U.S. foreign policy.”


To register for the event, please visit http://americanleadership.eventbrite.com/

Biography from U.S. Department of State
Jake Sullivan is the Director of Policy Planning at the United States Department of State and Deputy Chief of Staff to Secretary of State Clinton. Prior to assuming his post as Director in February 2011, Mr. Sullivan had served as Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy since January 2009. He also served as Deputy Policy Director on then-Senator Clinton’s presidential campaign, and as a member of the debate preparation team for then-Senator Obama’s general election debates. Mr. Sullivan previously served as Chief Counsel and senior policy adviser to Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, his home state.


Trained as a lawyer, he worked as an associate at the Minneapolis law firm of Faegre & Benson and as an adjunct professor at the University of St. Thomas Law School. Mr. Sullivan served as a clerk for Judge Guido Calabresi of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and for Justice Stephen Breyer of the United States Supreme Court.

Mr. Sullivan served in research posts for Leslie Gelb during Gelb’s tenure as President of the Council on Foreign Relations and for Strobe Talbott during Talbott’s time at the Yale Center for the Study of Globalization. He also worked as a reporter and researcher at Time Magazine in London.

Mr. Sullivan graduated from Yale College with a degree in Political Science and International Studies. He earned an M.Phil. in International Relations from Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship, where he served as managing editor of the Oxford International Review. He earned a J.D. from Yale Law School, where he was an Articles Editor of the Yale Law Journal.