President Biden Announces Nominees for Ambassadors and Key Roles

WASHINGTON – Today, President Joe Biden announced his intent to nominate the following leaders to serve as key leaders in his administration: 

• Elizabeth Bagley, Nominee for Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary to the Federative Republic of Brazil
• Jane Hartley, Nominee for Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary to the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
• Alexander Laskaris, Nominee for Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary to the Republic of Chad
• Alan Leventhal, Nominee for Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary to the Kingdom of Denmark
• Kathryn Huff, Nominee for Assistant Secretary for Nuclear Energy, Department of Energy
• Deborah Coen, Nominee for Member of the National Council on the Humanities
• William Brodsky, Nominee for Member of the Securities Investor Protection Corporation

Elizabeth Bagley, Nominee for Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary to the Federative Republic of Brazil

Elizabeth Bagley has worked in diplomacy and the law for over four decades. Her diplomatic experience includes service as Senior Advisor to Secretaries of State John Kerry, Hillary Clinton, and Madeleine Albright. She has also served as Special Representative to the United Nations General Assembly, Special Representative for Global Partnerships, and United States Ambassador to Portugal.

Bagley is currently the owner and Board member of SBI., a cellular communications company in Show Low, AZ. Previously, Bagley served as Of Counsel to Manatt, Phelps law firm in Washington, D.C., specializing in international law. She also worked as Adjunct Professor at Georgetown University Law Center and as Associate Producer for ABC News in Paris, France and Washington, DC. Earlier in her career, Bagley served in the State Department as congressional liaison for the Panama Canal Treaties, Special Assistant for the Camp David Accords and Congressional liaison to the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (Helsinki Accords) in Madrid, Spain. Bagley earned a B.A. at Regis College, Weston, Massachusetts, and a J.D. at Georgetown University Law Center.

She is the recipient of numerous honors, including the Secretary of State’s Distinguished Honor Award, the Meridian International Public Diplomacy Award and the Grand Cross of Prince Henry the Navigator, Portugal’s highest civilian honor.

Jane Hartley, Nominee for Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary to the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland

Jane Hartley served as Ambassador to the French Republic and the Principality of Monaco from 2014-2017. In that role, she worked to strengthen the U.S.-France bilateral relationship, focusing on counterterrorism cooperation. She arrived in Paris shortly before the Charlie Hebdo attack and served through the Bataclan and Nice attacks. Hartley subsequently received the Legion of Honor from the President of France in recognition of her efforts.

Previously, Hartley was Chief Executive Officer of Observatory Group, an international economic and political advisory firm. Before founding the Observatory Group, she was Chief Executive Officer of the G7 Group, a premier research firm providing macroeconomic and political analysis to global clients. Hartley currently serves as a member of the Visiting Committee of the Kennedy School at Harvard University, as well as the Executive Committee and the Dean’s Council of the Kennedy School. She is a member of the Board of Trustees of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and is a member of the Board of Overseers at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. She is Chairman of the Board of Trustees of Sesame Workshop (Sesame Street). Hartley is also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. Previously, Hartley was a Member of the Board of Trustees of Heidrick & Struggles and a Presidential appointee to the Board of Directors of the Corporation for National and Community Service. She was Vice Chairman of the Executive Committee of the Economics Club of New York and held positions as Vice President at both Universal (MCA) and Westinghouse Broadcasting.

Hartley also served at the White House in the Carter Administration. She earned a B.A. at Boston College (Newton College).

Alexander Laskaris, Nominee for Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary to the Republic of Chad

Alexander Laskaris is a career member of the Senior Foreign Service, class of Minister-Counselor. He is currently serving as a Senior Advisor in the Bureau of African Affairs and has expertise on African issues. He has served as Deputy to the Commander at the United States Africa Command, as Ambassador to the Republic of Guinea, and as Deputy Chief of Mission of the U.S. Embassy in Bujumbura, Burundi. Other assignments include work as the Political Section Chief of the U.S. Embassy in Angola and Desk Officer for Rwanda and Burundi in the State Department’s Office of Central African Affairs. Laskaris also has served as a faculty member at the National War College, as Consul General in Ebril, Iraq, and as Team Leader of the Mosul Province Reconstruction Team in Iraq. He also was the Deputy Chief of Mission of the U.S. Embassy in Pristina, Kosovo.

Laskaris earned a B.A. degree from Georgetown University, and an M.A. degree from the U.S. Army War College in Washington, DC. His foreign languages include French, Portuguese, Greek, Kurdish, Albanian and Spanish. 

Alan Leventhal, Nominee for Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary to the Kingdom of Denmark

Alan Leventhal is the Chairman and CEO of Beacon Capital Partners,  one of the leading owners and managers of office properties in the United States. It is home to leading innovative and growth companies, and its projects have been transformational to the urban environment. Previously, Leventhal was a General Partner, and then President and CEO, of Beacon Properties Corporation.

Leventhal was the Board Chair of the Damon Runyon Cancer Research Foundation for a decade and still serves on the Board’s Executive Committee. He is also on the Executive Committee of the Corporation of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is a Life Trustee of Northwestern University and was a Trustee and Board Chair of Boston University. Leventhal also serves as the Board Chair of the Leventhal Map & Education Center at the Boston Public Library and on the Board Executive Committee of A Better City.

He earned his B.A. from Northwestern University and his M.B.A. from Dartmouth College. 

Kathryn Huff, Nominee for Assistant Secretary for Nuclear Energy, Department of Energy

Dr. Kathryn Huff has served as the Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary for the Office of Nuclear Energy since May 2021. Prior to this role, she was an Assistant Professor in the Department of Nuclear, Plasma, and Radiological Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where she led the Advanced Reactors and Fuel Cycles Research Group. Huff was also a Blue Waters Assistant Professor with the National Center for Supercomputing Applications.

Previously, Huff was a Postdoctoral Fellow in both the Nuclear Science and Security Consortium and the Berkeley Institute for Data Science at the University of California-Berkeley. She received her PhD in Nuclear Engineering from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2013, and her undergraduate degree in Physics from the University of Chicago. Huff is an active member of the American Nuclear Society and is a past Chair of the Nuclear Nonproliferation and Policy Division, past Chair of the Fuel Cycle and Waste Management Division, and a recipient of both the Young Member Excellence and Mary Jane Oestmann Professional Women’s Achievement awards. Through leadership within Software Carpentry, SciPy, the Hacker Within, and the Journal of Open-Source Software, she has also advocated for best practices in open, reproducible scientific computing.

Deborah Coen, Nominee for Member of the National Council on the Humanities

Deborah R. Coen is Professor of History and Chair of the Program in History of Science & Medicine at Yale University, and a former faculty member at Barnard College and Columbia University. As a historian of science, she is committed to diversifying her discipline and facilitating collaboration between the humanities and natural sciences. Her research addresses questions such as the relationship between science and democracy, the history of citizen science, and the politics of scientific uncertainty. She is particularly interested in the conditions that enable intellectual exchange across cultural divides, such as the supranational institutions of the Habsburg Monarchy. She is the author of Vienna in the Age of Uncertainty: Science, Liberalism, and Private Life (2007), and The Earthquake Observers: Disaster Science from Lisbon to Richter (2013). Her latest book is Climate in Motion: Science, Empire, and the Problem of Scale (2018), the first history of the science of climate dynamics before the computer age. Her current research seeks to illuminate the historical roots of key concepts in present-day climate science and policy, such as “usable” knowledge and “vulnerable” populations.

Coen earned an A.B. in Physics from Harvard, an M.Phil. in History and Philosophy of Science from Cambridge, and a Ph.D. in History of Science from Harvard, where she was also a Junior Fellow of the Society of Fellows. Her research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Cullman Center of the New York Public Library, and the Mellon Foundation, and she was a 2014 Guggenheim Fellow.

William Brodsky, Nominee for Member of the Securities Investor Protection Corporation

William (Bill) Brodsky has been in the financial services industry for over 50 years. His career roles have included asset classes of stocks, options, futures, private equity and venture capital. Brodsky has worked at four major exchanges including the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), the American Stock Exchange (AMEX), the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) where he served as President and CEO from 1985-1997, and the Chicago Board Options Exchange (Cboe), where he served as CEO from 1997-2013 and Chairman from 2013-2017. In addition, he served on the boards of the Options Clearing Corporation (OCC) and the Futures Industry Association (FIA). Internationally, Brodsky was Chairman of the International Options Market Association (IOMA), and Chairman of the World Federation of Exchanges, the global body of more than sixty of the leading exchanges of the world. He also served for over ten years on The International Capital Markets Advisory Committee of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

Currently, Brodsky is a Trustee of Syracuse University, where he serves on the Investment and Endowment Committee. He is a life Trustee of Northwestern Medical Healthcare where he served as Chairman of the Board and Chairman of its Investment Committee for fourteen years. He is Chairman of the Board of Navy Pier, Inc., the most visited venue in Chicago and the Midwest, and is Chairman of Cedar Street Asset Management, Options Solutions and Redmont Wealth Advisors.

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