Pakistani-American Salman Ahmed joins Joe Biden's foreign policy team

United States President-elect Joe Biden has named another Pakistani-American in his administration, The Washington Post reported.

Pakistani-American Salman Ahmed has been inducted in Biden's foreign policy team as a director of policy planning that the US State Department. 

He has served as the head of strategic planning in Barrack Obama's National Security Council. Prior to that, he served as the chief of staff of the US Mission to the United Nations and a senior policy advisor to the US Permanent Representative to the UN.

Ahmed is the Pakistan-American to be a part of the Biden administration after Ali Zaidi was appointed climate advisor last month.

The Pakistani-American holds a master's degree in international relations from the University of Cambridge, and a bachelor of science in economics from New York University’s Stern School of Business.

He served as a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, where he directed research and led a task force dedicated to making US foreign policy work better for the middle class. 

Ahmed has managed complex international security challenges on behalf of the White House, the US Department of State, and the UN for the past twenty-five years. 

He also directly supported then secretary of state John Kerry’s negotiations with Russia on Syria between 2013 and 2016. He was the co-chair of the International Ceasefire Task Force in Geneva.

Before joining the US Department of State in 2009, Ahmed served as a visiting professor and research scholar at Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, where he taught graduate-level courses on peacekeeping and post-conflict reconstruction.