Academic Events, Community, Social Justice
Coffee chat: Empowering Voices in Diplomatic and Humanitarian Sectors
Join the Office of Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion for a virtual coffee chat with Maryum Saifee, Senior Advisor to the Secretary’s Office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, U.S. Department of State.
Register in advance for Zoom link
About Guest Speaker: Maryum Saifee is a U.S. diplomat currently serving as a senior advisor for the first Chief Diversity and Inclusion Officer at the U.S. Department of State.
Ms. Saifee started her foreign service career in Cairo during the early days of the Arab Spring in 2011 and later served in Baghdad during the U.S. military withdrawal from Iraq and spokesperson for the U.S. Consulate in Lahore. In Washington, she was a policy advisor in the Bureau of International Organization Affairs, the Secretary’s Office of Global Women’s Issues, and the Secretary’s Office of Religion and Global Affairs.
Prior to joining the State Department, she was a Peace Corps Volunteer in Jordan and an AmeriCorps Volunteer in Seattle. She also consulted for the United Nations Development Program, Acumen Fund, and the Ford Foundation. In 2018, Ms. Saifee took a sabbatical from the State Department to pursue a Council on Foreign Relations International Affairs Fellowship where she worked with the Human Rights Foundation, a global network of dissidents fighting authoritarianism. In her personal capacity, she also led a task force on State Department reform as a senior visiting fellow at the Truman Center for National Policy.
Maryum is a graduate of Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs where she focused on political and economic development issues in the Middle East and North Africa.