Election 2024: Moving toward the transition

Melody Barnes is the executive director of the UVA Karsh Institute of Democracy, a professor of practice at the Miller Center, 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.

Eric Edelman, a Miller Center practitioner senior fellow, retired as a career minister from the U.S. Foreign Service in 2009 after having served in senior positions at the Departments of State and Defense as well as the White House. As the undersecretary of defense for policy (2005–2009), he oversaw strategy development as the Defense Department’s senior policy official with global responsibility for bilateral defense relations, war plans, special operations forces, homeland defense, missile defense, nuclear weapons and arms control policies, counter-proliferation, counter-narcotics, counter-terrorism, arms sales, and defense trade controls. Edelman served as U.S. ambassador to the Republics of Finland and Turkey in the Bill Clinton and George W. Bush administrations and was principal deputy assistant to Vice President Dick Cheney for national security affairs.

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.

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.