Karen Elliott House is a senior fellow at Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs.

Elliott House retired in 2006 as publisher of The Wall Street Journal, senior vice president of Dow Jones & Company, and a member of the company’s executive committee.  She is a broadly experienced business executive with particular expertise and experience in international affairs stemming from a distinguished career as a Pulitzer Prize winning reporter and editor.

She is author of On Saudi Arabia: Its People, Past, Religion, Fault Lines—and Future, published in September 2012 by Knopf.

During a 32-year career with Dow Jones and The Wall Street Journal, Elliott House also served as foreign editor, diplomatic correspondent, and energy correspondent based in Washington D.C.  Her journalism awards include a Pulitzer Prize for international reporting for coverage of the Middle East (1984), two Overseas Press Club awards for coverage of the Middle East and of Islam and the Edwin M. Hood award for Excellence in Diplomatic Reporting for a series on Saudi Arabia (1982).

In both her news and business roles, she traveled widely over many years and interviewed world leaders including Saddam Hussein, Lee Kwan Yew,  Zhu Rongji, Vladimir Putin, Shimon Peres, Benjamin Natanyahu, Saudi King Abdullah, Hosni Mubarak, Margaret Thatcher, Richard Nixon, Helmut Kohl, George H.W. Bush, the late King Hussein and Yasser Arafat. She  has appeared frequently on television over the past three decades as an executive of the Wall Street Journal and as an expert on international relations.

Elliott House has served and continues to serve on multiple non-profit boards including the Rand Corp., where she is chairman of the board, the Trilateral Commission, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Asia Society, the German-American Council, and Boston University.  She also is a member of the advisory board of the College of Communication at the University of Texas. She is a graduate of the University of Texas at Austin where in 1996 she was the recipient of the University’s “Distinguished Alumnus” award.  She studied and taught at Harvard University’s Institute of Politics and she holds honorary degrees from Pepperdine University (2013), Boston University (2003) and Lafayette College (1992).  She also is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.