Jake Sullivan  Jacob Jeremiah Sullivan (born November 28, 1976) is an American policymaker and was a senior policy advisor to Hillary Clinton's 2016 U.S. presidential election campaign, with expertise in foreign policy. He was spoken of as a front-runner for the position of U.S. National Security Advisor under a potential Hillary Clinton administration, before she lost to Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election. At present, Sullivan is the Montgomery Fellow at Dartmouth College and a senior fellow and Master in Public Policy faculty member at the Carsey School of Public Policy. Sullivan was also a senior advisor to the U.S. government for the Iran nuclear negotiations and a visiting professor at Yale Law School. Prior to teaching at Yale, Sullivan worked in the Obama Administration as Deputy Assistant to the President and National Security Advisor to U.S. Vice President Joe Biden. He also served as the Director of Policy Planning at the U.S. Department of State, and as Deputy Chief of Staff to U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Prior to this, he was deputy policy director on Hillary Clinton's 2008 presidential primary campaign, and a member of the debate preparation team for Barack Obama's general election campaign. Sullivan attended Southwest High School in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He was a debate champion, president of the student council, and voted "most likely to succeed" in his class. Sullivan attended Yale University, where he received a Bachelor of Arts degree in political science in 1998. In 2000, he graduated with an MPhil having received a Rhodes Scholarship to study international relations at the University of Oxford, and became a managing editor of the "Oxford International Review". Afterwards, he returned to Yale Law School and graduated with a Juris Doctor degree in law in 2003. At Yale, he was an editor of the "Yale Law Journal" and the "Yale Daily News". He was a member of the Yale Debate Association, and earned a Truman Scholarship in his junior year. He also worked for Brookings Institution President Strobe Talbott at the Yale Center for the Study of Globalization. After his studies, Sullivan clerked for Second Circuit Court of Appeals judge Guido Calabresi and Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States Stephen Breyer. After the clerkships, Sullivan practiced at Faegre & Benson for several months, and taught law as an adjunct professor at the University of St. Thomas in Minneapolis. After Faegre & Benson, he worked as chief counsel to U.S. Senator from Minnesota Amy Klobuchar, who connected him to Clinton.