Philip Zelikow is the immediate past Counselor of the U.S. Department of State, where he served for two years as a senior policy advisor on a wide range of issues to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. Before his appointment as Counselor, Dr. Zelikow served as the Executive Director of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, better known as the 9/11 Commission.

Currently, Dr. Zelikow is the White Burkett Miller Professor of History at the University of Virginia. Until his State Department appointment in 2005, he also served as director of the University'’s Miller Center of Public Affairs. He was a member of the President’'s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (2001-2003), and served as executive director of the National Commission on Federal Election Reform, chaired by former Presidents Carter and Ford, which led to the Help America Vote Act of 2002. He also served as executive director of the Markle Foundation Task Force on National Security in the Information Age.

Dr. Zelikow received his M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in international law and diplomacy from Tufts University'’s Fletcher School. He served in three different offices of the U.S. Department of State in the second Reagan administration, and joined the National Security Council in the George H. W. Bush administration. He left the NSC in 1991 and to teach public policy at Harvard University where he also served as co-director of Harvard'’s Intelligence and Policy Program.

His books include The Kennedy Tapes (with Ernest May), Germany Unified and Europe Transformed (with Condoleezza Rice), and the rewritten Essence of Decision (with Graham Allison). Dr. Zelikow has also been the director of the Aspen Strategy Group, a policy program of the Aspen Institute.