Alan Bersin

Alan Bersin serves at the global law firm of Covington & Burling as a Senior Advisor to the Firm; as Inaugural Senior Fellow in the Homeland Security Project at the Belfer Center, Harvard Kennedy School of Government; as a Global Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars in Washington D.C.; as the Inaugural North America Fellow at the Canada Institute and the Mexico Institute (Wilson Center); and as a member of the Advisory Committee to the Quebec Government Office in Washington. He is Chairman of BorderWorks Group, a consulting firm specializing in matters of Border Security and Management; and Executive Chairman of Altana Trade, an enterprise devoted to providing machine learning and artificial intelligence-based insights on border management and global trade.

Bersin was appointed by President Obama as U.S. Commissioner of Customs and Border Protection and served as Assistant Secretary for Policy & International Affairs and Chief Diplomatic Officer for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS). He was appointed by President Bill Clinton to serve as U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of California, during which service he was also the Attorney General’s Southwest Border Representative (the so-called Border Czar). He served as Vice President of INTERPOL for the Americas Region and as a member of the INTERPOL Executive Committee. He currently serves as a Member of the Board of Trustees of the INTERPOL Foundation based in Geneva. Bersin has also held numerous distinguished state and local government positions, including serving as California’s Secretary of Education, Superintendent of Public Education in San Diego, and Chairman of the San Diego Airport Authority. He received his A.B. from Harvard College (magna cum laude), attended Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar and received his J.D. from the Yale Law School.