President Biden's first year

Joshua Bolten is president & CEO of Business Roundtable, an association of CEOs of leading U.S. companies. Before joining Business Roundtable in January 2017, Bolten was managing director of Rock Creek Global Advisors, a consulting firm that he co-founded in 2011. Bolten spent the preceding two years as a visiting professor at Princeton University.

Bolten’s twenty years of government service includes eight years in the White House under President George W. Bush as chief of staff (2006–09), director of the Office of Management & Budget (2003–06), and deputy chief of staff for policy (2001–03). For the preceding two years, he was policy director of the Bush 2000 presidential campaign. Bolten’s previous private sector experience includes work at Goldman Sachs in London and O’Melveny & Myers in Washington, DC.

Bolten received his undergraduate degree from Princeton in 1976 and his law degree from Stanford in 1980. He is a member of the board of Emerson Electric Co. He also serves on the boards of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, the ONE Campaign, and Princeton University.

Valerie Smith Boyd is the director of the Center for Presidential Transition at the Partnership for Public Service, where she leads the Partnership’s efforts to support successful transition planning for current and future Presidential administrations. She has had a long public service career, having served in the past three administrations in both career and political roles. Valerie was part of the small team that stood up Department of Homeland Security headquarters in 2002. She supported President Bush’s transfer of homeland security knowledge during the 2008 transition and assisted President Obama’s team with their 2009 integration of the Homeland Security Council and National Security Council staffs. During her time at the NSC, she organized the interagency policy process and managed briefing and decision materials for the President and the Cabinet. Most recently, Valerie returned to DHS, where she oversaw policy development for homeland security partnerships around the world. Between public service, she has worked in corporate social responsibility. She has degrees from the University of California, Berkeley, and the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. Valerie has worked with too many outstanding public servants to choose a favorite and believes that leaders from across government must work together to solve problems in service to the American people.

Ann Compton is a former news reporter and White House correspondent for ABC News. A distinguished and highly respected 40-year veteran of the White House press corps, she was the first woman assigned by a television network to cover the White House. Her tenure stretched across seven presidents as well as innumerable globe-altering events, including the end of the Cold War. During the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, Compton was the only broadcaster allowed to remain on board Air Force One after President George W. Bush was advised not to return to Washington, DC. She recently completed a term on the Miller Center's Governing Council.

Eric Edelman, Miller Center practitioner senior fellow, retired as a career minister from the U.S. Foreign Service in 2009, after having served in senior positions at the Departments of State and Defense as well as the White House. As the undersecretary of defense for policy (2005–2009), he oversaw strategy development as the Defense Department’s senior policy official with global responsibility for bilateral defense relations, war plans, special operations forces, homeland defense, missile defense, nuclear weapons and arms control policies, counter-proliferation, counter-narcotics, counter-terrorism, arms sales, and defense trade controls. Edelman served as U.S. ambassador to the Republics of Finland and Turkey in the Clinton and George W. Bush Administrations and was principal deputy assistant to Vice President Dick Cheney for national security affairs. Edelman has been awarded the Department of Defense Medal for Distinguished Public Service, the Presidential Distinguished Service Award, and several Department of State Superior Honor Awards. In January of 2011 he was awarded the Legion d’Honneur by the French government. In 2016, he served as the James R. Schlesinger Distinguished Professor at the Miller Center.

Guian McKee is an associate professor in Presidential Studies at the Miller Center. McKee’s research focuses on how federal policy, especially in the executive branch, plays out at the local level in American communities. He has written extensively about urban policy, including a book that explored the connections between local and federal economic, urban renewal, and antipoverty policies in Philadelphia between the 1950s and the 1980s. This project led to his extensive work on the Lyndon Johnson White House recordings focused on the War on Poverty, as well as on the wider development of the Great Society. He is currently working on a book project that examines the rise of the health care economy in American cities after World War II.

Suzanne Maloney is the vice president and director of the Foreign Policy program at the Brookings Institution, where her research focuses on Iran and Persian Gulf energy. Prior to being named vice president and director, she served as the deputy director of Foreign Policy for five years. At Brookings, she is a leading voice on U.S. policy toward Iran and the broader Middle East, testifying before Congress, briefing policymakers, and engaging with government, non-profit organizations and corporations. She is a frequent commentator in national and international media.

J. Stephen Morrison is a senior vice president at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington D.C., where he founded and directs its Global Health Policy Center. A political scientist, he has built over the past two decades a highly dynamic and impactful program that concentrates on the geopolitical and national security dimensions of U.S. leadership in international health, with a special emphasis upon the centrality of bipartisanship and multilateral institutions, partnerships with private industry, foundations, advocates and the faith community, and long-term strategic planning and commitments. He is the producer of the docuseries, The Pandemic Paradox: HIV on the Edge, and hosts the podcast series, Coronavirus Crisis Update.

Ian H. Solomon is dean of the Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy at UVA, where he leads a multidisciplinary faculty of scholars and practitioners who are committed to creating new knowledge, developing ethical and effective leaders, and advancing solutions to humanity’s greatest policy challenges. Trained as a lawyer, Solomon is a devoted student and teacher of both negotiation and conflict resolution. Over the course of his career, he has dedicated himself to improving the lives of people across the globe by integrating insights from his experiences in higher education, government, the private sector, and international organizations. For four years, Solomon served in the U.S. Senate as legislative counsel to then-Senator Barack Obama. Later, under the Obama administration, he was confirmed unanimously by Congress as the U.S. executive director for the World Bank Group, where he championed private-sector development in Africa and negotiated a range of multi-stakeholder agreements. 

Kathryn Dunn Tenpas is a nonresident senior fellow with Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution, senior research director for the White House Transition Project, a fellow with the Center for Presidential Transition at the Partnership for Public Service, and secretary of the Governance Institute. Tenpas is a scholar of the American presidency focusing on White House staffing, presidential transitions, and the intersection of politics and policy within the presidency (e.g., presidential reelection campaigns, trends in presidential travel, and polling). She has authored the book Presidents as Candidates: Inside the White House for the Presidential Campaign and published more than 50 articles, book chapters, and papers on these topics.