Commander Kate Higgins-Bloom is currently assigned to the Coast Guard Office of Emerging Policy (CG-DCO-X), where she works as a strategist and the Director of Project Evergreen, the U.S. Coast Guard’s strategic foresight initiative. Kate’s previous staff tours include White House Fellow and Acting Chief of Staff DHS Office of Legislative Affairs. As a White House fellow, Kate worked for First Lady Michelle Obama developing public-private partnerships in support of veteran employment, mental health, and entrepreneurship. She has held a variety of operational leadership roles, including Command Center Chief and SAR Mission Coordinator for Sector Hampton Roads, Incident Management Chief for Sector Boston, and Commanding Officer of USCGC BARANOF.  Over the course of those tours, Kate specialized in leading complex security, inter-agency crisis response, and search and rescue operations. She has deployed throughout the Caribbean, Eastern Pacific, NS the Arabian Gulf; and to numerous domestic responses, including Hurricane Katrina.  Kate was also a member of the Atlantic Incident Management Assist Team, and supported events ranging from large scale oil spill response to the 2009 Presidential Inauguration. Kate holds a Bachelor of Science in Civil Engineering from the U.S. Coast Guard Academy and a Master of Public Administration from the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. She also served as a Federal Executive Fellow at the Brookings Institution and is a member of the 2020-2021 cohort of MIT Seminar XXI. Kate lives in Washington D.C. with her husband and their two children. *** Correction at minute (07:15) - CDR Higgins-Bloom assisted with the White House's goal of adding 250,000 jobs for veterans, not 250 *** -------------------------- Fellowship Opportunities CNAS NextGen National Security Leaders Fellowship - https://www.cnas.org/next-generation-programs/nextgeneration White House Fellowship - https://whff.org/ SAIS Phillip Merrill National Security Scholars and Practitioners Seminar https://www.merrillcenter.sais-jhu.edu/nsspp MIT Seminar XXI - https://semxxi.mit.edu/ Council on Foreign Relations Term Fellowship - https://www.cfr.org/ German Marshall Fund Transatlantic Fellowship  - https://www.gmfus.org/transatlantic-leadership-initiatives/marshall-memorial-fellowship German Marshall Fund Young Strategists Forum - https://www.gmfus.org/forum/young-strategists-forum