Dr Karin von Hippel is the first woman and non-Briton to hold the position of the Director-General of the Royal United Services Institute. Prior to joining RUSI, she served for nearly six years in the Bureau of Counterterrorism, and eventually as Chief of Staff to General John Allen, Special Presidential Envoy for the Global Coalition to Counter-ISIL. Further to this, she has served as a director for the Post-Conflict Reconstruction Project in Washington DC and is a research fellow at King’s College London. She has also worked for the UN, the EU and has several publications to her name, on top of degrees from the LSE, University of Oxford and Yale.