Sharon Waxman

Biography

Sharon joined the FLA in 2015 after serving as Vice President for Public Policy at the International Rescue Committee (IRC), where she developed rights based policy and strategies and led a global team based in Africa, the Middle East, Brussels, Geneva, London, New York, and Washington. As Deputy to the Undersecretary of State for Civilian Security, Democracy and Human Rights, she advanced U.S. policy on international labor, human trafficking, refugee rights and other human security issues. She provided oversight of five Bureaus and two Ambassadorial offices, including the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor, and the Office to Combat Trafficking in Persons. For more than a decade, she served as Senior National Security Advisor to U.S. Senator Edward Kennedy (D-MA), and earlier in her career, she served as Associate Staff to the Senate Appropriations Committee. Sharon is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. She previously served on the Board of the US Global Leadership Coalition, and currently serves on the Sustainability Advisory Board for Nespresso and the Advisory Board for Cornell University’s New Conversations Project. She received her B.A. from the University of California, Berkeley and her Masters of International Public Policy at the Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies.