Katherine Bliss

Roles: Special Guest

Katherine Bliss is deputy director and senior fellow with the CSIS Global Health Policy Center. She is also senior fellow with the CSIS Americas Program and directs the CSIS Project on Global Water Policy. Before joining CSIS, she was a foreign affairs officer at the U.S. Department of State, where she led work on environmental health for the Bureau of Oceans, Environment, and Science. In 2006, she received the Bureau’s Superior Honor Award for her work on environmental health, as well as avian and pandemic influenza preparedness. As a 2003–2004 Council on Foreign Relations international affairs fellow, Bliss served as a member of the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff, covering issues related to global health, international women’s issues, Mexico, and the Summit of the Americas. Previously, she served on the faculty at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, where she held tenure and was associate professor. She is currently an adjunct associate professor at Georgetown University and teaches courses in the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service. Bliss is the author or coeditor of books, reviews, and articles on global water challenges, public health, gender, and development politics. She is a frequent public speaker and contributes regularly to print, radio, and television media coverage of water, global health, and Latin America issues. Bliss received her Ph.D. from the University of Chicago’s Division of Social Sciences and was a David E. Bell fellow at the Harvard School of Public Health’s Center for Population and Development Studies. She received her A.B. magna cum laude and her A.M. from Harvard University and studied at the Colegio de México in Mexico City.