Judd Devermont is the Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for African Affairs at the National Security Council (NSC). He most recently served as the special advisor for Africa strategy at the NSC from 2021-2022. Prior to the NSC he served as the director of the Africa Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) from 2018 to 2021. Mr. Devermont previously was national intelligence officer for Africa from 2015-2018. In this position, he led the U.S. intelligence community’s analytic efforts on sub-Saharan African issues and served as the DNI’s personal representative at interagency policy meetings. Mr. Devermont also was the Central Intelligence Agency’s senior political analyst on sub-Saharan Africa from 2013-2015. Prior to this role, he served as the National Security Council director for Somalia, Nigeria, the Sahel, and the African Union from 2011 to 2013. In this position, he contributed to the U.S. Strategy Toward Sub-Saharan Africa, signed by President Obama in 2012, and managed the process that resulted in U.S. recognition of the Somali government for the first time since 1991. Mr. Devermont spent two years abroad working at the U.S. Embassy in Abuja, Nigeria from 2008 to 2010.​ Mr. Devermont has also lived in South Africa and Cote d’Ivoire, and he has traveled widely across the continent. He has a master’s degree in African studies from Yale University and bachelor’s degree in history from the University of California, Los Angeles.​