Jeremy Konyndyk is president of Refugees International, an organization that works in the US and overseas to build a more welcoming world for displaced people.
Prior to joining Refugees International, Jeremy served in the Biden administration as USAID’s lead official for COVID-19, overseeing a multi-billion-dollar COVID-19 assistance portfolio and the donation of hundreds of millions of vaccine doses. He later served as the administration’s lead official for the global MPox response. He also served on the Biden-Harris transition team.
From 2013–2017, Jeremy served in the Obama administration as the director of USAID’s Office of U.S. Foreign Disaster Assistance (OFDA). He led the U.S. government’s response to international disasters including the Ebola outbreak in West Africa, the 2016 Ethiopia drought, conflict in Northern Nigeria, the Nepal earthquake, Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines, and the conflicts in Yemen, South Sudan, and Syria.
Jeremy worked from 2017–2020 as a senior policy fellow at the Center for Global Development, where his research focused on humanitarian response and pandemic preparedness. He has also worked extensively in the humanitarian NGO sector as a country director in Uganda, South Sudan, Guinea, and Kosovo and later as a policy director in Washington DC.