Michele Markoff

Biography

Michele G. Markoff
Michele Markoff has had a distinguished diplomatic career in the United States Department of State shaping the international landscape to reduce risk to the United States and its allies posed by weapons of mass destruction and emerging threats to strategic stability inherent in cyberspace tools. Most recently, Michele Markoff was the Distinguished Scholar and Visiting State Department Professor at the College of Information and Cyberspace of the National Defense University instructing senior military officers how diplomacy was used to establish international norms and guidelines on offensive uses of cyber weapons. She was 2023 recipient of the prestigious College of Information and Cyberspace (CIC) Admiral Grace Hopper Award for distinguished service in the fields of information and cyberspace in national security.

From 2014, she was successively the Deputy and Acting Coordinator in the Secretary of State’s Office of the Coordinator for Cyber Issues and later acting Deputy Assistant Secretary for International Cyberspace Security in the Department of State’s newly established Bureau of Cyberspace and Digital Policy. From 1998 Ms. Markoff was the senior State Department subject matter expert developing, negotiating and implementing foreign policy initiatives on cyberspace issues. She coordinated U.S. policy on the spectrum of cyber security related issues across the Department and interagency and developed diplomatic strategies to encourage states to join the United States in taking steps to cooperate internationally to enhance and preserve global cyber stability. Ms. Markoff implemented those strategies through negotiations in a wide variety of venues. Ms. Markoff was the U.S. lead negotiator at the UN forseven successive Groups of Governmental Experts (GGE) in 2005, 2010, 2013, 2015, 2016, and 2019, and the 2019-2021 Open-Ended Working Group (OEWG) and final GGE