Samantha Power is a professor of practice at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government. Her recent book, A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide, was awarded the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for general non-fiction, the 2003 National Book Critics Circle Award for general non-fiction, and the Council on Foreign Relations' Arthur Ross Prize for the best book in US foreign policy.

Prof. Power was the founding executive director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy (1998-2002). From 1993-1996, she covered the wars in the former Yugoslavia as a reporter for the US News and World Report, the Boston Globe, and the Economist. She currently contributes to the New Yorker and The New York Review of Books. Prof. Power is the editor, with Graham Allison, of Realizing Human Rights: Moving from Inspiration to Impact (St. Martin's, 2000). A graduate of Yale University and Harvard Law School, she moved to the United States from Ireland at the age of nine. She is currently working on a book on the United Nations.