American public official and foreign policy analyst who served as a member of the National Security Council (1993–97), assistant secretary of state for African affairs (1997–2001), and U.S. ambassador to the United Nations (2009– ).

Rice's father was a governor on the board of the Federal Reserve (Federal Reserve System), and her mother was an education scholar. She grew up in Washington, D.C., where she graduated as valedictorian from the elite National Cathedral School. After earning a B.A. from Stanford University in 1986, she attended the University of Oxford on a Rhodes scholarship. Rice received a master's degree (1988) and a Ph.D. (1990) in international relations from Oxford before returning to the United States to work as a consultant in the private sector.

In 1993 Rice joined the National Security Council under Pres. Bill Clinton (Clinton, Bill), where she had responsibility for international organizations and global peacekeeping initiatives. In that role, Rice supported the administration policy that blocked intervention in the genocide in Rwanda (she later expressed regret for that decision). In 1995 she became the National Security Council's senior director for African affairs. Two years later, she moved to the State Department, where she worked under lifelong friend and mentor Madeleine Albright (Albright, Madeleine), and she continued to focus on African affairs until Clinton's term expired in 2001.

In 2002 Rice joined the Brookings Institution. While there she published papers on international terrorism, the global implications of weak and failed states, and peacekeeping. In 2004 she served as a senior adviser on national security for the presidential campaign of Democratic candidate John Kerry (Kerry, John). She returned to the campaign trail in 2008, when she became senior foreign policy adviser to presidential candidate Barack Obama (Obama, Barack). Nominated by Obama to serve as the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, she was confirmed in January 2009.