Data Science Institute

Dr. Jessica Ashooh is based in San Francisco, where she is Vice President of Policy for Reddit, the online discussion platform. In this capacity, she addresses a range of online and technology policy issues and leads the company’s global government relations. Previously, from 2015 to 2017, Ashooh served as Deputy Director for Madeleine Albright and Stephen Hadley’s bipartisan Middle East Strategy Task Force at the Atlantic Council. In this position, she focused on long-term strategy to more comprehensively address state failure and violent extremism in the Middle East.

From 2011 to 2015, Ashooh worked as a senior analyst in the UAE Foreign Ministry’s Policy Planning Department in Abu Dhabi. She specialized on the crisis in Syria, and worked in close cooperation with the UAE special envoy for Syria and with moderate elements of the Syrian opposition to support the Geneva II peace process. Ashooh also spent time in Erbil, Iraq in 2010 working as a consulting adviser to the Kurdistan Regional Government’s Minister of Planning.

Ashooh is a life member of the Council on Foreign Relations and holds a doctorate in international relations from Oxford (St. Antony’s College), which she attended as a Marshall Scholar. Ashooh did her undergraduate studies at Brown University and also spent time at the American University of Beirut and at the Bourguiba Language Institute in Tunis.