Foreign Policy & National Security Challenges

Karen DeYoung is Senior National Security Correspondent and an Associate Editor of The Washington Post. In addition to coverage of national security policy throughout the Bush and Obama administrations, she has served as assistant managing editor for national news, and both national and foreign editor, as well as in numerous overseas assignments. DeYoung was a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and in 2006 published SOLDIER: The Life of Colin Powell.

She is the recipient of numerous journalism awards, including the 2009 Overseas Press Club award for best coverage of international affairs, the 2003 Edward Weintal Prize for diplomatic reporting, and the 2002 Pulitzer Prize awarded to The Washington Post for national reporting.

Patricia Ellis is President and Co-Founder of the Women's Foreign Policy Group. She previously was a foreign affairs reporter and producer for the MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour and a producer in the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s Washington bureau. Ms. Ellis taught at American University’s Washington Semester Program specializing in news coverage of foreign affairs. She also previously did research at the US Mission to the UN, the Center for International Studies at MIT, the New York City Department of Consumer Affairs and the law firm of Cahill, Gordon and Reindel LLP. In 1989, she was awarded a fellowship at the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics, and Public Policy at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. Ms. Ellis was subsequently awarded a fellowship by The Freedom Forum for Media Studies at Columbia University. She was part of the Mac Neil-Lehrer team that won the George Peabody Award for the documentary series on South Africa, “Faces of Apartheid” and an Emmy Award for coverage of the Grenada Crisis. She also participated in the European Community Visitor’s Program and received the Netherlands Universities’ Foundation for International Cooperation Scholarship for graduate study at the Institute of Social Studies in The Hague.

Ms. Ellis is a founding board member of the International Women’s Media Foundation, member of the Council on Foreign Relations, the Chiefs (heads of foreign policy non-profits), and the Cosmos Club. She previously served on the boards of Women’s Edge, The Overseas Education Fund International and the advisory boards of The Public Diplomacy Foundation, Main Street America and the Third World. She also participated in the Media and Foreign Policy Group at Johns Hopkins Foreign Policy Institute and the Media and Foreign Policy Gulf War Project at the Social Science Research Council. She frequently moderates programs and speaks on the media and foreign policy, and international affairs careers. She received a BA in government with honors from Wheaton College, Massachusetts, an MA in international relations from New York University, and a graduate diploma in international relations from the Institute of Social Studies, The Hague. She speaks French.

David E. Sanger is Chief Washington Correspondent for The New York Times. In 30 years at the Times, he has reported from New York, Tokyo and Washington, covering a variety of issues surrounding foreign policy, globalization, and nuclear proliferation. He is also a senior fellow at Harvard’s Belfer Center and an adjunct lecturer in public policy at the Kennedy School. Sanger has been a member of two teams that won the Pulitzer Prize, and has been awarded numerous honors for
national security and foreign policy coverage. He is the author of two NY Times best-sellers: Confront and Conceal: Obama's Secret Wars and Surprising Use of American Power (2012) and The Inheritance: The World Obama Confronts and the Challenges to American Power (2009).