Board of Trustees

Jon Finer

Jon Finer is the Distinguished Leadership Fellow at Yale Law School, Co-Host of The Long Game podcast through Vox Media and a strategic advisor to several leading companies. He served as U.S. Principal Deputy National Security Advisor from 2021-2025 and received the National Security Medal, the President’s highest award for contributions to national security. From 2017 to 2020, he was the Head of Geo-Political Affairs at Warburg Pincus LLC and an Adjunct Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. Before that, Mr. Finer was Chief of Staff and Director of Policy Planning at the U.S. Department of State from 2013-2020, and was awarded the Secretary’s Distinguished Service Award, the Department’s highest honor. He spent the previous four years at the White House, including as a Special Adviser for the Middle East and foreign policy speechwriter in the Office of the Vice President. He served as a White House Fellow in the Office of the Chief of Staff. Prior to entering government, Mr. Finer was a foreign and national correspondent for The Washington Post, spending 18 months in Baghdad covering the Iraq War and embedding with the U.S. Marines during the 2003 invasion. He also covered conflicts in Gaza, Georgia, and Israel/Lebanon, the 2004 U.S. presidential campaign, and the 2004 Major League Baseball playoffs. Mr. Finer spent a year in Hong Kong as a Henry Luce Foundation Scholar, working as a reporter and editor for the Far Eastern Economic Review, where he received the 2002 Young Journalist Award from the Society of Publishers in Asia. He has taught international affairs at Yale and at Princeton. Originally from Vermont, he holds a J.D. from Yale, where he co-founded the International Refugee Assistance Project; an M.Phil in international relations from Oxford, where he was a Rhodes Scholar; and an undergraduate degree from Harvard.