Alumni Breakfast & Speaker Program

Alyson King is His Majesty’s Ambassador to the Democratic Republic of the Congo. She took up her appointment in April 2023. She most recently served as Deputy Head of Mission in Beirut, Lebanon, and before that, as the UK government’s Arabic spokesperson and senior regional communicator for Middle East and North Africa (MENA). Alyson was previously Deputy Director, Policy in the Scotland Office.

Before that, King was in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO), leading on bilateral relations with 17 countries in northern and central Europe as well as the Republic of Ireland, EU institutional policy and staffing, and the FCO’s work on devolution. King’s previous roles included conflict resolution work in Sudan, a secondment to the European Commission working on sanctions and conflict diamonds, and legal advisory roles on international and EU law in both Brussels and London.

King holds a First-Class degree in Jurisprudence from Oxford University as well as an LLM in International Law from Columbia Law School; a Masters in International Affairs from SIPA, Columbia University, and a Masters in EU Law (distance learning) from King’s College London. She worked for a leading US law firm in New York and London before joining the civil service. She speaks French, Spanish, and Arabic.

Tom Nichols is a staff writer at The Atlantic. An expert on international security issues, he taught national security affairs for 25 years at the U.S. Naval War College, as well as at the Harvard Extension School, Dartmouth College, and Georgetown University. He was a Fellow of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, and an adjunct at the US Air Force School of Strategic Force Studies. In Washington, he was a Fellow of the Center for Strategic and International Studies and served on Capitol Hill as personal staff for defense and security affairs to the late Senator John Heinz of Pennsylvania.

He is the author of several books on Russia, the Cold War, and international politics. In 2017 he wrote The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why It Matters, an international best-seller that has been translated into fourteen foreign languages and has been released in an updated and expanded version in 2024. His most recent book is Our Own Worst Enemy: The Assault from Within on Modern Democracy, which Publisher’s Weekly called “A searing critique of contemporary political culture and the rise of illiberalism on both the right and the left.”

He is also a five-time undefeated Jeopardy! champion and was listed in the Jeopardy Hall of Fame after his 1994 appearances as one of the best players of the game. A native of Massachusetts, he lives in Rhode Island.