Jennifer Harris
Co-Chair, BuildUS; Director, Economy and Society Initiative, Hewlett Foundation
Jennifer Harris is the founding director of the Economy & Society Initiative at the William & Flora Hewlett Foundation, and the co-founder and co-chair of BuildUS, a $55M+ philanthropic fund focused on maximizing the economic and decarbonization potential of recent federal clean energy legislation. From January 2021 to March 2023, she served as Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for International Economics on the National Security Council and National Economic Council at the White House. Her portfolio spanned a range of economic, national security, and decarbonization policy areas, including U.S. economic policy toward China; the first-ever Global Minimum Tax agreement (signed by 136 countries); clean energy supply chains (e.g., solar, wind, and EV batteries); the Global Arrangement on Sustainable Steel (the first trade negotiation to predicate market access on emissions intensity); the Partnership for Global Infrastructure, and a number of critical minerals and green industrial policy efforts. Earlier in her career, Ms. Harris was a Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution, a Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, and a member of the policy planning staff at the U.S. Department of State. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, Financial Times, Washington Post, and Foreign Affairs, among other outlets. She is the co-author of War By Other Means: Geoeconomics and Statecraft (Harvard/Belknap 2016). She holds a J.D. from Yale Law School and an M.Phil from Oxford, where she was a Truman and Rhodes scholar.
