Ambassador Susan E. Rice serves as the U.S. Permanent Representative to the United Nations. She was unanimously confirmed to this position by the U.S. Senate on January 22, 2009.  Ambassador Rice believes that the United Nations has a vital role in advancing international peace and security and is committed to working to make the United Nations a more perfect forum to address the most pressing global challenges: to promote peace, to support development and democracy, and to strengthen respect for human rights. She has outlined four primary areas of focus: strengthening the capacity of the UN to undertake complex peace operations effectively; addressing climate change; preventing the spread or use of nuclear weapons and working to meet the goals of the Nonproliferation Treaty; and combating poverty, disease, violence and genocide.

Rice attended National Cathedral School, a prep academy in Washington, D.C. She excelled in academics, becoming her class valedictorian, and showed her aptitude in the politic realm as president of the student council. She also loved athletics, competing in three different sports, and became a star point guard on the basketball team.  After graduation, Rice attended Stanford University in Palo Alto, California. In college, she pushed herself to excel. She not only earned Departmental Honors and University Distinction, but also became a Harry S. Truman scholar, was elected to Phi Beta Kappa and earned a Rhodes scholarship. She turned the heads of top administrators when she created a fund that withheld alumni donations until the university either stopped their investments in companies doing business in South Africa, or the country ended apartheid.

After she received her bachelor’s degree in history in 1986, she went on to attend University of Oxford in Oxfordshire, England. Here she earned her M.Phil and D.Phil in international relations, and wrote a dissertation that examined Rhodesia’s transition from white rule. Her paper won the Royal Commonwealth Society’s Walter Frewen Lord Prize for outstanding research in the field of Commonwealth History, as well as the Chatham House-British International Studies Association Prize for the most distinguished doctoral dissertation in the United Kingdom in the field of International Relations.

She finished her schooling in 1990, and started work as an international management consultant at McKinsey & Company in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. On Septmber 12, 1992, she married her Stanford romantic interest, Ian Cameron, who was working as a television producer in Toronto for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. The couple lived in Canada until 1993, when Rice took a job with the National Security Council in Washington, D.C., under President Clinton.

Courtesy of Biography.com