Julie Southfield is a Career Member of the Senior Foreign Service with the rank of Counselor and is USAID’s incoming Mission Director for Lebanon. Ms. Southfield joins the Lebanon team from the Bureau for Conflict Prevention and Stabilization’s Office of Transition Initiatives (OTI) in Washington, DC, where she was the Deputy Director. OTI supports U.S. foreign policy priorities by seizing windows of opportunity in political landscapes to promote stability, peace, and democracy. As Deputy Director, Ms. Southfield was responsible for providing strategic programming direction and ensuring operations support for OTI programs in 15 countries/regions. Ms. Southfield also previously served as Deputy Regional Mission Director for the Central Asia Mission based in Kazakhstan. She joined USAID as a legal advisor, and served as Resident Legal Officer in Burma, Afghanistan, and Central Asia. Prior to joining USAID, Ms. Southfield was a capital markets lawyer at American Capital, a Bethesda, MD based asset management company and an Associate at the London and Washington DC offices of Cleary Gottlieb. Ms. Southfield is a graduate of the National War College with a Master’s Degree in National Security Strategy. She also holds a law degree from The George Washington University Law School, and Bachelor and Master’s Degrees in Anthropology from Purdue University. Ms. Southfield is a former U.S. Army Reservist and is originally from Indiana.