Ryan Arant is the Director, N7 Research Institute, the Policy Center of the N7 Initiative. Prior to assuming his current role, Arant was the Acting Director of the Israel-Gaza Coordination Unit at the Department of State and Project Manager for the AUTHOR Project, a multidisciplinary team developing novel Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) system for the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity.

Previously, Ryan served at the White House National Security Council and National Economic Council, where he played a key role in negotiating the Abraham Accords peace agreements and reshaping US economic and security policy towards the People’s Republic of China.  He also served in the Office of the Secretary of Defense for Policy, where he managed the U.S. defense relationship with key U.S. allies in the Persian Gulf.  Prior to his service in government, he was a management consultant at Accenture.

Ryan is the founder of Taskforce Sunflower, an ad hoc private group that evacuated over a thousand at-risk U.S. allies from Afghanistan after the American withdrawal. He is a Council of Foreign Relations term member, a former Presidential Management Fellow, and a former Columbia University Fellow.