Jeffrey Prescott is a visiting scholar in the American Statecraft Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Most recently, he served as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Agencies for Food and Agriculture in Rome, in the Biden administration. He also served as deputy to the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations from 2021-2024. During the Obama administration, Prescott served as then-Vice President Biden’s deputy national security advisor and special advisor for Asian affairs. He also served as special assistant to the president and senior director for Iran, Iraq, Syria, and the Gulf states on the National Security Council. He joined the Obama administration in 2010 as a White House Fellow. 

Previously, Prescott was executive director of National Security Action and strategic consultant to the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement at the University of Pennsylvania. He also was a senior research scholar and lecturer in law at Yale Law School and helped build Yale’s China Center. Prescott was a Bernstein Fellow and staff attorney at the Lawyers Committee on Human Rights (now Human Rights First), where he helped establish a rights defenders program to protect lawyers and activists at risk around the world. He started his career as law clerk to the Hon. Walter K. Stapleton, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit.  Raised in Wichita, Kansas, Prescott is a graduate of Boston University and Yale Law School.  He speaks Mandarin Chinese.