Nikita Lalwani is a nonresident scholar in the Technology and International Affairs program, where she writes about emerging technology and national security. She is also a fellow at the RAND Corporation. During the Biden administration, she was a director for technology and national security at the White House National Security Council, where she covered semiconductors, AI, export controls, and other matters related to U.S.-China technology competition. She also served as senior advisor to the director of the CHIPS Program Office at the U.S. Department of Commerce, where she helped establish the office responsible for administering $39 billion in semiconductor manufacturing incentives under the CHIPS and Science Act of 2022. 

Before government, she clerked for Judge Raymond J. Lohier, Jr., on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and Judge J. Paul Oetken in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. She has also taught writing and foreign policy at Yale, worked as a staff editor at Foreign Affairs and as a foreign correspondent for the Wall Street Journal in New Delhi, and written for publications including the Economist, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, the New Yorker, the Washington Post, and the Yale Law Journal, among others.  She holds a J.D. from Yale Law School, an M.Phil. in American History from the University of Cambridge, and a BA in English from Yale.