Dr. Chloe Schwenke is a Quaker human rights and peacebuilding activist, development practitioner, and academic with over three decades of international experience – nearly half of it while living in Africa. She recently served as vice president for global programs at Freedom House in Washington, D.C. and earlier still as an openly transgender senior political appointee for the Obama Administration at the US Agency for International Development (USAID) – the first transgender political appointee ever assigned to the federal foreign affairs agencies. Chloe currently teaches on the adjunct faculty at both the McCourt School of Public Policy at Georgetown University and at the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland, and works as an independent consultant in international development.

In her career, Chloe has worked in a senior capacity with some of the leading American development and human rights organizations, and as an independent consultant, on projects of USAID, the US State Department, the World Bank, the U.K.’s Department for International Development, and the Inter-American Development Bank. Her areas of expertise include human rights, LGBTI issues, international development ethics, gender equality & female empowerment, public policy, urbanization, and leadership ethics. She received her Ph.D. in public policy at the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland at College Park, where she was chosen as Alumna of the Year for 2013. Also in 2013 she was a recipient of the National Center for Transgender Equality’s National Public Service Award.