Minh-Thu Pham

Minh-Thu Pham is a nonresident scholar in the Global Order and Institutions Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Her primary areas of interest are multilateral cooperation and summit diplomacy, international organizations, sustainable development, and global governance and democracy. She also runs Project Starling, a group that works on renewing institutions, and teaches at the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs and Bard Globalization and International Affairs program.

Minh-Thu was an advisor to UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, where she helped to steer the UN through a period of deep crisis after the Iraq War and played a key role in the 2005 World Summit. As executive director of global policy at the UN Foundation, she started and ran a global effort to help the UN create and deliver the Sustainable Development Goals and undertake institutional reforms. Minh-Thu has led dozens of track 1.5 and 2 dialogues with ambassadors and civil society actors that have resulted in political breakthroughs. She built a global network of stakeholders to shape summit negotiations, which included think tanks and civil society actors from Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Her work helped to open up UN decision-making processes to a broader constituency. More recently, Minh-Thu has advised efforts to strengthen democracy globally and in the United States, and led an effort to mobilize immigrant voters and tackle misinformation.

Minh-Thu has been featured in the Washington Post, the New York Times, Politico, NBC Nightly News, the Tavis Smiley Show, and Cheddar TV among others. She serves on the boards of several nonprofits and is a fellow of the Truman National Security Project, a member of the Leadership Now Project, and was a term member of the Council on Foreign Relations (2007-2012). She came to the U.S. as a refugee from Vietnam and currently lives in New York City.