Tuesday Tea with John B. Brennan, US Dept. of State

A Washington University alumnus, John B. Brennan spent 30 years working in Consular Affairs at the US Department of State, primarily in the Foreign Service in embassies and consulates. He has significant experience in running large-scale programs with global reach gained through support and development of the systems that enable world-wide processing of U.S. visas and passports. As Deputy Assistant Secretary for Resources, he focused on modernizing and securing the IT systems of the Bureau of Consular Affairs. This included engagement in cybersecurity efforts at the Department of State and Interagency level and well as long-term project planning to improve disaster recovery, fail-over capacity, reliability and availability of consular systems. He has long-term experience in Asia with professional level spoken Mandarin and conversational Japanese. He has been engaged with all of the larger consular operations overseas, recently worked with both China and India, and served as the head of all consular operations in Mexico in my last overseas posting. He was involved in the formative program planning for the current information sharing, secure credential production, and biometric identity management that form the basis of current border security systems. He has an academic background in Chinese and Japanese and a deep understanding of the history, language and culture of both countries, including years of living and working in both nations.