Derek Chollet currently serves as the Senior Director for Strategic Planning for the National Security Council. He previously worked as the Deputy Director of Policy Planning at the State Department, and served as a Senior Fellow at the Center for a New American Security (CNAS), where he worked on  a variety of issues related to U.S. foreign policy and national security strategy. Chollet was also a non-resident fellow in the Brookings Institution's Global Economy and Development Program, and an adjunct associate professor at Georgetown University. He was a foreign policy adviser to Senator John Edwards (D-N.C.), serving both on his legislative staff and during the 2004 Kerry/Edwards presidential campaign. During the Clinton administration, Chollet worked in the U.S. State Department in several capacities, including chief speechwriter for Richard Holbrooke, then-U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, and as a special adviser to Strobe Talbott, the then-Deputy Secretary of State. He has also assisted former Secretaries of State James A. Baker III and Warren Christopher with the research and writing of their memoirs, Holbrooke with his book on the Dayton peace process in Bosnia , and Talbott with his book on U.S.-Russian relations during the 1990s. He has been a fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a fellow at the American Academy in Berlin and a visiting scholar and adjunct professor at The George Washington University. Educated at Cornell and Columbia Universities , he is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and serves on the boards of the Woodrow Wilson House and the Truman National Security Project. He is the author of The Road to the Dayton Accords: A Study of American Statecraft (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), and his commentaries and reviews on U.S. foreign policy and politics have appeared in the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Financial Times, Washington Monthly, and many other books and publications throughout the United States and Europe.