Alyssa Ayres is Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) for India, Pakistan, and South Asia. In 2015, she served as the project director for the CFR Independent Task Force on US-India Relations. From 2014 to 2016, Alyssa was the project director for The New Geopolitics of China, India, and Pakistan.

Alyssa also directs the US Relations with South Asia Roundtable series, she blogs regularly for Asia Unbound, and is a contributor to Forbes.com. Her book about the rise of India, ‘Our Time Has Come: How India is Making its Place in the World’, was published by Oxford University Press in January 2018.

Originally trained as a cultural historian, Alyssa has experience in the the not-for-profit, government, and private sectors.  Alyssa was the deputy assistant secretary of state for South Asia in the Obama administration from 2010 to 2013 providing policy direction for four US embassies and four consulates.

From 2008 to 2010 Alyssa was founding director of the India and South Asia practice at McLarty Associates, a Washington-based international strategic advisory firm.  Immediately prior, she served in the US Department of State as special assistant to the undersecretary for political affairs. Prior to that she worked in the nonprofit sector at the Center for the Advanced Study of India at the University of Pennsylvania and at the Asia Society in New York.

Her book on nationalism, culture, and politics in Pakistan, ‘Speaking Like a State’, was published worldwide by Cambridge University Press in 2009, and received the American Institute of Pakistan Studies book prize for 2011–2012. She has coedited three books on India and Indian foreign policy: ‘Power Realignments in Asia, India Briefing: Takeoff at Last?’, and ‘India Briefing: Quickening the Pace of Change’. Alyssa has been awarded numerous fellowships and has received group and individual Superior Honor Awards for her work at the State Department.

In the mid-1990s Alyssa worked as an interpreter for the International Committee of the Red Cross. She received an AB magna cum laude from Harvard College, and an MA and PhD from the University of Chicago where her dissertation was defended with distinction. She is a former term member of CFR and a life member since 2010.  Alyssa speaks fluent Hindi and Urdu.