With 20 years of experience at the forefront of global policymaking and innovative ventures, Minh-Thu is a political and policy entrepreneur, nonprofit leader, and activist. She is co-founder and CEO of Project Starling, is a Nonresident Scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and teaches at Princeton University’s School of Public and International Affairs.

As a former refugee and boat person from Vietnam, Minh-Thu knows how it feels to be powerless. And as a leader who has operated at senior levels of the policy world, she also knows what it’s like to have power. Driven by a belief that change requires connecting people, ideas, and power, Minh-Thu builds networks of policymakers, activists, and experts and helps them work together to build momentum for change. She leverages her knowledge of international relations and institutions, social change, political organizing, strategic communications, and public policy to shape politics and policy, mobilize action, and help ideas make an impact.

Previously, Minh-Thu was an advisor to UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, where she helped to steer the UN through a period of deep crisis after the Iraq War and played a key role in the 2005 World Summit to address the crisis in multilateralism at that time. As executive director of global policy at the UN Foundation for over a decade, she started and ran a global effort to help the UN create and deliver the Sustainable Development Goals, the Addis Ababa Action Agenda for Financing for Sustainable Development, and undertake institutional reforms. Minh-Thu has led dozens of track 1.5 and track 2 dialogues with government officials and civil society actors that have resulted in political breakthroughs. She built a global network of stakeholders to shape summit negotiations, which included think tanks and civil society actors from Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Her work helped to open up UN decision-making processes to those not usually represented. More recently, Minh-Thu has advised efforts to strengthen democracy globally and in the United States, and led an effort to mobilize immigrant voters in the 2020 U.S. presidential election and tackle misinformation targeting them.

Minh-Thu has been featured in the Washington Post, the New York Times, Politico, NBC Nightly News, the Tavis Smiley Show, and Cheddar TV among others. She serves on the boards of several nonprofits and is a member of the Leadership Now Project, a fellow of the Truman National Security Project, and was a term member of the Council on Foreign Relations. She received her MPA in international politics and policy from Princeton University, and she has a BA in History from Duke University.

Minh-Thu was born in Vietnam, which she visits regularly to see family, is a lifelong follower in the Plum Village tradition of Thich Nhat Hanh, and currently lives in New York City with her husband and two daughters.