Lorraine Hariton spent 25 years in various senior level positions including CEO of two venture backed start-ups in Silicon Valley before being appointed by President Obama to be Special Representative for Commercial and Business Affairs at the US Department of State (September 2009 – February 2014). Currently she is a Senior Advisor at the Transnational Strategy Group and Senior Vice President for Global Partnerships for the New York Academy of Sciences. At the New York Academy of Sciences, she supports the Global STEM Alliance, is a global initiative to increase the number and diversity of students in the STEM pipeline. She is also on the board of the Wiki Education Foundation and on the advisory board of Silicon Accra.

At the State Department she was responsible for outreach to the business community, commercial advocacy and global entrepreneurship efforts. She worked with US embassies around the world to ensure that support of business was a priority and was instrumental in establishing entrepreneurship as a foreign policy tool. She launched the highly successful Global Entrepreneurship Program (GEP) and supported the Presidential Summit for Entrepreneurship and Co-Chaired the US-Japan, Mexico-US and US-Russia innovation and entrepreneurship working groups.

Ms. Hariton has over 25 years of experience in the information technology sector in Silicon Valley. During her business career Ms. Hariton worked in a range of sectors including cloud computing, Internet of things, retail payment systems, Internet audio solutions, speech applications, data security and telecommunications.

The Harvard Business School Club of Northern California has honored her as one of the Bay Area's most influential female graduates, and Watermark, a premier Silicon Valley organization for technology executives, honored her as a “Woman Who Has Made Her Mark.”

Ms. Hariton has an M.B.A. from Harvard Business School and a B.S. in Mathematical Sciences from Stanford University. She has two grown children and currently resides in New York City. She loves to cycle, enjoys the out of doors, politics and international travel.


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