Ambassador Nicholas Burns is the Roy and Barbara Goodman Family professor of the practice of diplomacy and international relations at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government. He is the founder and faculty chair of the Future of Diplomacy Project. He is also a faculty affiliate at Harvard’s Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies.
Burns served as the US ambassador to the People's Republic of China from 2021 to 2025.
He worked in the US government for over three decades, serving six presidents and nine secretaries of state. As a career foreign service officer, he was under secretary of state for political affairs from 2005 to 2008, the State Department’s third-ranking official when he led negotiations on the US–India Civil Nuclear Agreement and a long-term military assistance agreement with Israel, and the lead US negotiator on Iran’s nuclear program. He was US ambassador to NATO when the alliance invoked Article 5 of the NATO Treaty on 9/11 in defense of the United States. He served as US ambassador to Greece and State Department spokesman. He worked for five years on the National Security Council at the White House at the end of the Cold War as senior director for Russia, Ukraine, and Eurasia Affairs and special assistant to President Bill Clinton; and as director for Soviet affairs in the George H.W. Bush administration. He also served in the American consulate general in Jerusalem, where he coordinated US economic assistance to the Palestinian people in the West Bank and, before that, at the American embassies in Egypt and Mauritania. He was a member of Secretary of State John Kerry’s foreign affairs policy board.
Burns is vice chairman of the Cohen Group and co-chair of the Aspen Strategy Group and Aspen Security Forum. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Council on Foreign Relations. He is a fellow of the Massachusetts Historical Society.
He has received 15 honorary degrees, the Presidential Distinguished Service Award, and the Secretary of State’s Distinguished Service Award, among other distinctions.