Jessica Ashooh
Biography
Dr. Jessica Ashooh is Vice President of Policy for Reddit. In this capacity, she oversees all global government relations and public policy for the company, in addition to advising on matters of content, product, and advertising policy.
Ashooh comes to Reddit from a previous career in international affairs focused on the Middle East. From 2015 to 2017, she served as Deputy Director for former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and former National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley’s bipartisan Middle East Strategy Task Force at the Atlantic Council. 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 war in Syria, working in close cooperation with the UAE special envoy for Syria and the Syrian political opposition to support the UN-led peace process in Geneva. Ashooh also spent time in Erbil, Iraq in 2010 working as a consultant to the Kurdistan Regional Government’s Minister of Planning.
Ashooh holds a doctorate in international relations from Oxford (St. Antony’s College), which she attended as a Marshall Scholar. She did her undergraduate studies at Brown University, including time abroad at the American University of Beirut in Lebanon and the Bourguiba Language Institute in Tunisia.
From 2015 to 2019, Ashooh served on the board of No One Left Behind, a veteran-led charity committed to the US resettlement of Afghan and Iraqi interpreters who served with US troops and now face threats to their lives for doing so. She is a life member of the Council on Foreign Relations and was named one of San Francisco Business Times’s 40 under 40 for 2020.