Dr. Rebecca Bill Chavez is President and CEO of the Inter-American Dialogue, the leading U.S. think tank on Latin America and the Caribbean. The Dialogue builds networks of cooperation and action to advance democratic resilience, shared prosperity, social inclusion, and sustainable development across the Western Hemisphere. 

Dr. Chavez has over three decades of foreign policy and national security experience in academia and government service. She served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Western Hemisphere Affairs during the Obama administration. Before that, she was a tenured professor of political science at the U.S. Naval Academy, specializing in democracy and security issues. 

She is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, the Foreign Policy for America Advisory Board, the Leadership Council for Women in National Security, and the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies Advisory Council. She is the author of The Rule of Law in Nascent Democracies (Stanford University Press). Her work has appeared in leading scholarly journals, and her commentary has been published in outlets such as The New York Times, Foreign Policy, and the Miami Herald. 

Raised in Austin, Texas, Dr. Chavez earned her PhD in political science from Stanford University and her BA in public and international affairs from Princeton University.