Alumni Update: Tara Maller '03

Tara Maller was a Government major and she wrote a senior thesis focused on looking at the role of technology as a determinant of war outcomes. She took a lot of courses in both the American Politics and International Relations subfields. One course that stands out from her time at Dartmouth was her military analysis seminar for which she wrote a paper focused on urban warefare in Baghdad. In addition to taking many government courses in Hanover, Tara also spent time interning in Washington DC as part of the Dartmouth in Washington program and she also took part in the Dartmouth-Oxford University Exchange program. At Oxford, she took classes focused on Political Theory and Comparative Politics. As a Dartmouth student, she was Co-Chair of Dartmouth Women in Leadership,  a member of the Dartmouth Mock Trial team, & a Representative & Parliamentarian in Dartmouth Student Assembly. She also loved regularly attending events hosted by the Rockefeller Center and getting the opportunity to interact with political candidates on campus during primary season in New Hampshire!

Currently, Tara is a Risk Manager, Public & Social Sectors, at McKinsey & Company. She previously served as Spokesperson and Senior Policy Advisor for the Counter Extremism Project (CEP). CEP is a not-for-profit, non-partisan, international policy organization formed to combat the growing threat from extremist ideology.

Maller has appeared as a regular national security and foreign policy commentator on Bloomberg, CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, and Fox Business.

She was previously Director of Strategic Communications for the newly formed Service Year Alliance, a joint venture of the Aspen Institute and Be The Change. The Franklin Project at the Aspen Institute, where Maller served as Associate Director of Strategic Communications, is now part of this new venture. She is also a research fellow in the International Security Program at New America. Maller previously served as a military analyst at the Central Intelligence Agency, where she focused on the Iraq insurgency. She has also worked in the private sector at a NY-based media startup, BrightWire Inc., where she served as Managing Director of Operations and Managing Editor. The company provided curated & custom international economic and political content to corporate clients. She has also done work in the private sector as a security consultant focused on terrorism threat assessments.

Maller received her Ph.D. in Political Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with a concentration in International Relations and Security Studies. She was also a predoctoral research fellow at the Belfer Center for Science & International Affairs at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. She received her M.A. in International Relations from the University of Chicago and she graduated with a B.A. in Government from Dartmouth College. You can follow her on Twitter at @TaraMaller