Samantha Power

Samantha Jane Power is an Irish-born American academic, author, political critic, and diplomat. She served as the United States Ambassador to the United Nations from 2013 to 2017. She began her career by covering the Yugoslav Wars as a journalist. From 1998 to 2002, she served as the Founding Executive Director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, where she later became the first Anna Lindh Professor of Practice of Global Leadership and Public Policy. She was a senior adviser to Senator Barack Obama until March 2008, when she resigned from his presidential campaign after apologizing for referring to then-Senator Hillary Clinton as "a monster." She joined the Obama State Department transition team in late November 2008. She served as Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Multilateral Affairs and Human Rights on the National Security Council from January 2009 to February 2013. Obama chose her to chair a newly formed Atrocities Prevention Board in 2012. She is considered to have been a key figure in the Obama administration in persuading the president to intervene militarily in Libya. In 2016, she was listed as the 41st most powerful woman in the world by Forbes. She is a subject of the 2014 documentary Watchers of the Sky, which explains the contribution of several notable people, including Power, to the cause of genocide prevention. She won a Pulitzer Prize in 2003 for her book A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide, a study of the U.S. foreign policy response to genocide. She attended Lakeside High School in Atlanta, Georgia, where she was a member of the cross country team and the basketball team. She subsequently received her B.A. degree from Yale University and her J.D. degree from Harvard Law School. She married law professor Cass Sunstein, whom she met while working on the Obama campaign in 2008. She has two children.

Born on: 21 September, 1970

Born in: Dublin, Ireland