Deborah Schneider is the Staff Director for the Nuclear Risk Reduction Center, Bureau of Arms Control and Verification and Compliance, U.S. Department of State. She is responsible for U.S. compliance with the notification regimes associated with international conventional and nuclear arms control treaties and confidence-building agreements. She directs the 24/7 Watch Center that maintains the permanent communications links with Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine in addition to links with the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe and the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons.

Before assuming her current position, Dr. Schneider was the Representative of the U.S. Departments of State and Energy on the staff of the President’s Daily Brief. She has previously served in the State Department as Senior Coordinator on cyber operations policy; Coordinator for Crisis Task Forces on Benghazi, WikiLeaks, and the 2010 Haitian earthquake; Special Assistant to the Deputy Secretary of State; Senior Watch Officer in the Secretary’s Operations Center; and Deputy Director and Acting Office Director in the Bureau for Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor.

Dr. Schneider has been awarded multiple Superior Honor and Meritorious Honor awards by the Department of State, and a National Intelligence Award from the Director of National Intelligence in 2011. She spent a year as an Excellence in Government Fellow with the Partnership for Public Service, and was invited back as a cohort coach for that program in 2012.

Dr. Schneider came to Washington in 2000, from SUNY Binghamton, via a sabbatical funded by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, during which she helped manage a USDA program on privatizing agribusiness in Armenia. She subsequently partnered with Rutgers University to direct an 18-month project on rural women’s leadership in Armenia. At SUNY Binghamton she taught anthropology and political science as an Assistant Professor. She was a post-doctoral fellow at the Remarque Institute for European Studies at NYU, and did her doctoral fieldwork in Poland in the 1990s on post-Soviet decentralization and privatization, which resulted in the publication of a book, Being Goral. She has a Ph.D. and M.A. from the University of California, Davis, and a B.A. from Drew University.