Election 2024: Moving toward the transition

Melody Barnes is the J. Wilson Newman Professor of Governance at the Miller Center, as well as the executive director of the UVA Karsh Institute of Democracy and a senior fellow at UVA Law's Karsh Center for Law and Democracy. During the Obama administration, Barnes was assistant to the president and director of the White House Domestic Policy Council. She also was executive vice president for policy at the Center for American Progress and chief counsel to the late Senator Edward M. Kennedy on the Senate Judiciary Committee.

John Harris is co-founder and global editor-in-chief of POLITICO. He is also a member of the Miller Center's Governing Council. Harris began his career at The Washington Post, covering politics on the local, state, and national levels. From 1995 to 2001, he covered the Clinton White House. Later, he expanded on his reporting in a history of that presidency, The Survivor: Bill Clinton in the White House. He is also co-author, with his friend and fellow journalist Mark Halperin, of a book on presidential politics, The Way to Win: Taking the White House in 2008. After 20 years as a reporter, he became an editor, which led him and Jim VandeHei to launch POLITICO, a publication about politics from the ground up. Harris is a graduate of Carleton College, where he studied American history.

Chris Liddell was assistant to the president and deputy chief of staff for policy coordination during the Trump administration. Before that, he served as assistant to the president and director of strategic initiatives, overseeing the administration’s efforts to streamline the federal government’s regulatory process and modernize its technology systems. Liddell also served as senior vice president and chief financial officer at Microsoft and vice chairman and chief financial officer at General Motors, where he led global finance operations and managed the company’s $23 billion IPO in November 2010, which, at the time, was the largest public offering in history. In 2012, Liddell was the executive director of the Romney presidential transition planning team. He holds a bachelor of engineering degree with honors from the University of Auckland and a master of philosophy degree from Worcester College, Oxford University.

William J. Antholis has served as director and CEO of UVA's Miller Center of Public Affairs since January 2015. In that time, the Miller Center has strengthened its position as the leading nonpartisan research institution on the American presidency and worked with scholars across the University of Virginia to deliver vital research to policymakers and the public. Before coming to the Miller Center, Antholis served as managing director at the Brookings Institution from 2004 to 2014, working directly with Brookings's president and vice presidents. Antholis is the author of Inside Out India and China: Local Politics Go Global (2013) and co-author (with Strobe Talbott) of Fast Forward: Ethics and Politics in the Age of Global Warming (2010). He has published articles, book chapters, and opinion pieces on U.S. politics, U.S. foreign policy, international organizations, the G8, climate change, and trade.