Divya D. Khosla has nearly fifteen years of experience in U.S. foreign policy and national security. She has served as the Director for Global Development at the White House National Security Council since March 2021, coordinating and driving interagency policy processes on a range of functional priorities—her directorate is charged with tackling global food insecurity, humanitarian crises, atrocity prevention, multilateral engagement on global development priorities, including the SDG’s, and global health. She also helped manage U.S. Human Rights Council and UN Third Committee engagement in partnership with other NSC components. 

Prior to the White House, she led a team of US Government energy and climate experts and policy advisors for three years, regularly briefing senior White House officials and driving analysis on global energy trends and climate initiatives. Between 2014-2016, she served on the United States Delegation to the Human Rights Council at the US Mission to the United Nations in Geneva as a lead negotiator on a range of international resolutions and advisor to the US Ambassadors to the HRC and to International Organizations. She has also served at USUN in NY covering the Security Council, worked as a liaison to a US military command, and served on a response team at USAID. She is a substantive expert on global humanitarian disasters, human rights, war crimes and atrocities, countering violent extremism, and multilateral negotiations and diplomacy, and has extensive experience driving U.S. interagency policy processes and advising senior White House officials.

Divya is the Deputy Executive Director of the SDK Foundation for Human Dignity, a family foundation focused on the promotion of human rights and economic empowerment, and serves on the Advisory Board for the Artistic Freedom Initiative, a non-profit organization she co-founded that provides probono legal assistance and resettlement services to persecuted artists globally.

Prior to working for the US Government, Divya worked on a joint Columbia University and United Nations project covering the post-election violence in Kenya, worked in the Counterterrorism Division of Human Rights Watch, and was a fellow at International Bridges to Justice, an NGO that focuses on global criminal justice reform. Her experience also includes working at a civil rights litigation firm in Washington DC, UNICEF, the Vera Institute of Justice in NY, as well as for a former US Senator (NJ).  She began her human rights career working in Tibetan refugee camps in Dharamsala, India, where she produced a documentary on human rights abuses and consulted with the Dalai Lama. 

She has published and edited pieces for the NYU Law and Security Center, BBC, the UN, and Columbia University. Divya received her BA from Middlebury College and London School of Economics, and her Masters in International Affairs from Columbia University. She has professional certificates from Harvard Kennedy School’s Executive Leadership Program, MIT Sloan’s Executive Management Program, Oxford University’s Forced Migration Program, and the Salzburg School of Law’s International Humanitarian Law Series.