Strobe Talbott, former journalist, Rhodes Scholar, and Deputy Secretary of State, currently serves as president of the Brookings Institution, which provides means and opportunity for scholars to study and share across disciplines the pressing issues involved in the American democratic process: education, economics, science and technology, governance, and social, military, and international policy. These inquiries are often cross-cultural, connecting the local and global. Talbott continues to contribute to knowledge in the areas of globalization and United States foreign policy. Immediately before coming to the Institution, he was founding director of the Yale Center for the Study of Globalization. The Center provides an arena for Yale faculty and notable national and international scholars to discuss the social effects of globalization.

Talbott's early career was spent as a journalist with Time magazine, where he worked for twenty-one years. His many posts included Eastern European correspondent, State Department correspondent, White House correspondent, Diplomatic correspondent, and Washington Bureau Chief. His tenure at Time culminated with his being named foreign affairs columnist and Editor-at-Large. In 1993, he left Time magazine to work for the State Department. In this capacity, he served as Ambassador-at-Large and Special Adviser to the Secretary of State on the New Independent States.

He became Deputy Secretary of State in 1994. In this role, he conducted several rounds of U.S.-India negotiations following India's nuclear tests in 1998. His principal counterpart in those negotiations, India's former Foreign Minister, Jaswant Singh, will join Talbott in the second of his Patten lectures.

Talbott is a graduate of The Hotchkiss School and Yale University, and spent three years at Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar upon receiving his Yale degree in 1968. His prolific career includes published translations of two volumes of Nikita Krushchev's memoirs and his three-book series on U.S.-Soviet relations, which made him one of the leading scholars on diplomacy and the United States association with the former Soviet Union. His recent books include The Age of Terror: America & The World After September 11, co-edited with Nayan Chanda (2001); The Russia Hand: A Memoir of Presidential Diplomacy (2002); and Engaging India: Diplomacy, Democracy, and the Bomb (2004). His most recent work, The Great Experiment: From Tribes to Global Nation, is forthcoming in January 2008.

Evidence of Talbott's high regard among the academic and nonacademic community is perhaps best reflected in the other positions held throughout his distinguished career. These include Yale Corporation fellow, Hotchkiss School trustee, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace trustee, Council on Foreign Relations director, North American Executive Committee of the Trilateral Commission director, and American Association of Rhodes Scholars director. He also holds honorary doctorates from four institutions and was awarded state orders by the dignitaries of five countries.