Alice Hill is the David M. Rubenstein senior fellow for energy and the environment at the Council on Foreign Relations. Her work at CFR focuses on the risks, consequences, and responses associated with climate change.
Hill previously served as special assistant to President Barack Obama and senior director for resilience policy on the National Security Council staff where she led the development of national policy to build resilience to catastrophic risks, including climate change and biological threats.
Her coauthored book, Building a Resilient Tomorrow, was published in 2019. In 2020, Yale University and the Op-Ed Project awarded her the Public Voices Fellowship on the Climate Crisis. Hill’s book, The Fight for Climate After COVID-19, was published in 2021. Hill is also a contributing author to the book, Standing Up for a Sustainable World: Voices of Change, edited by Claude Henry, Johan Rockström, and Nicholas Stern.
Hill's writing has appeared in numerous publications, including Axios, CNN, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, Nature, and Lawfare, among others. She has made numerous TV and radio appearances as a climate expert, including on CBS, NBC, NPR, MSNBC, PBS Newshour, and the Washington Post.
In 2009, Hill served as Senior Counselor to the Secretary of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS), in which she led the formulation of DHS's first-ever climate adaptation plan and the development of strategic plans regarding catastrophic biological and chemical threats, including pandemics. While at the Department of Homeland Security, Hill founded and led the internationally recognized anti-human trafficking initiative, the Blue Campaign.
Hill served as a research fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution from 2016 to 2019, during which time she was awarded the National Institute of Building Sciences’ President’s Award and the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center Writing Fellowship. In 2016, Harvard University’s National Preparedness Leadership Initiative also named her Meta-Leader of the Year.
Earlier in her career, Hill served as supervising judge on both the superior and municipal courts in Los Angeles and as chief of the white-collar crime prosecution unit in the Los Angeles U.S. Attorney’s office. The Department of Justice awarded her its highest accolade, the John Marshall Award for Outstanding Legal Achievement.
Hill earned her bachelor’s degree in history and economics with distinction from Stanford University and her law degree from the University of Virginia School of Law.
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