Eileen Donahoe

Eileen Chamberlain Donahoe is a former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva, Switzerland, having been appointed by President Barack Obama in 2009. (She was the first ambassador following the referent UN body changing from the predecessor United Nations Commission on Human Rights.) After serving her term as ambassador, Donahoe was appointed as Director of Global Affairs for Human Rights Watch. In 2014, she was also appointed to the board of International Service for Human Rights. She is also an affiliate of Stanford University's Center for International Security and Cooperation, a center of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and Executive Director of the Global Digital Policy Incubator at the Freeman Spogli Institute's Cyber Policy Center working at the intersection of governance, technology and human rights. Education Donahoe holds a bachelor's degree in American Studies from Dartmouth College, and she received her JD and master's degree in East Asian Studies from Stanford. She also earned a master's degree in Theological Studies from Harvard University, and a PhD in Ethics and Social Theory from the Graduate Theological Union, an affiliate of University of California, Berkeley. Career Donahoe’s professional career began in litigation, with the law firm Fenwick & West in Silicon Valley, where she worked as a technology litigator. For a time, she served as a law clerk for the United States District Court for the Northern District of California and Judge William H. Orrick Jr. In 2006 she published her PhD dissertation on the topic of Humanitarian Military Intervention. The dissertation addressed conflicting moral imperatives versus the rule of law justifications associated with military intervention during humanitarian crises.