Speaker biographies

Danielle Pletka is the vice president for foreign and defense policy studies at AEI. Her research areas include the Middle East (including Iran, Iraq, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict), South Asia (India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan), terrorism, and weapons proliferation. While at AEI, Ms. Pletka has developed a conference series on rebuilding post-Saddam Iraq, a project on democracy for the Arab world, a roundtable of experts to discuss global energy security, and a project to develop bilateral relations between India and the United States. She recently served as a member of the congressionally mandated Task Force on the United Nations, established by the United States Institute of Peace. Before coming to AEI, she served for ten years as a senior professional staff member for the Near East and South Asia on the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations. Ms. Pletka has also been a journalist based in Washington and the Middle East.

Newt Gingrich, former Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, is a Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. Speaker Gingrich is a member of the Terrorism Task Force for the Council on Foreign Relations and the U.S. Commission on National Security, an advisory board member of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, and a member of the Defense Policy Board.  Gingrich also served as co-chair, along with former Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell, of the Task Force on U.N. Reform created by the Congress in December 2004. He is also an editorial board member of the Johns Hopkins University Journal Biosecurity and Bioterrorism and a contributor for the Fox News Channel. He writes a weekly newsletter for Human Events and is a regular contributor to the Church Report.  He is the author of eleven books, including NY Times best-seller Winning the Future: A 21st Century Contract with America, Rediscovering God in America, and most recently, Pearl Harbor: A Novel of December 8, the first in the Pacific War Series. His 12th book, A Contract with the Earth, will be released this fall. Gingrich is Chairman of the Gingrich Group, Founder of the Center for Health Transformation, and General Chairman of American Solutions for Winning the Future. 

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