Michael Signer
Senior Policy Advisor and Director of the Homeland Security Presidential Transition Initiative
Michael Signer is Senior Policy Advisor and Director of the Homeland Security Presidential Transition Initiative, a joint project of the Center for American Progress Action Fund and Third Way.
In 2007-08, he was Senator John Edwards’ foreign policy adviser on his presidential campaign. In this position, he was responsible for all of the campaign’s major foreign policy and national security speeches and statements. He also appeared as a campaign surrogate at major public events in Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina and regularly represented Senator Edwards before print, broadcast, and online media.
In 2005, he was appointed Deputy Counselor to Governor Mark Warner in Richmond, Virginia, where he counseled the governor on a wide variety of criminal, civil, policy, and regulatory matters and was assigned to homeland security and National Guard and Reserve reform policy.
Dr. Signer is an adjunct professor in Virginia Tech’s Master’s in Government and International Affairs Program, where he teaches classes on political theory, foreign policy, and democracy. He is a Principal of the Truman National Security Project and was a founding contributor at DemocracyArsenal.org. He previously has been an associate at Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale & Dorr in Washington, D.C., where he belonged to the Government Litigation and Government and Public Policy groups and served as Chair of the Pro Bono Commission of the Young Lawyers Committee of the Virginia State Bar. He has held senior staff positions on a number of national, statewide, and local campaigns, including election protection director for the 2004 Democratic campaign in Virginia.
He has been interviewed by The Washington Post, NPR, and MSNBC, among others. He is completing a book on democracy and foreign policy, to be published by Palgrave Macmillan. His writing has also been published in The Washington Post, Democracy: A Journal of Ideas, USA Today, The American Prospect Online, and the University of Richmond Law Review.
Dr. Signer holds a Ph.D. in political science from U.C., Berkeley, where he was a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow; a J.D. from the University of Virginia, where he was president of the UVA Law Democrats and co-founder and co-president of the American Constitution Society; and a B.A., magna cum laude, from Princeton University. He lives in Arlington, Virginia.