Ms. Cheryl Mills is the Counselor and Chief of Staff to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. As Counselor, Ms. Mills is a principal officer who serves the Secretary as a special advisor on major foreign policy challenges and provides guidance to department bureaus with respect to such matters. Ms. Mills currently is leading the Department’s interagency global hunger and food security initiative and diplomacy and development efforts in Haiti. As Chief of Staff, Ms. Mills manages the Secretary’s staff and provides policy and managerial support to the Secretary in administering operations of the Department.
From 2002 to 2009, Ms. Mills served as Senior Vice President at New York University. During her tenure at NYU, Ms. Mills was Senior Vice President for Operations and Administration, supervising business operations of the University; Senior Vice President and General Counsel, supervising the Office of Legal Counsel, and Senior Vice President supervising the Offices of Legal Counsel, Public Safety, Compliance and Risk Management. Ms. Mills also served as Secretary to the Board of Trustees.
From 1999 to 2001, Ms. Mills was Senior Vice President for Corporate Policy and Public Programming at Oxygen Media, where she oversaw public policy, communications and philanthropic and community initiatives; she also co-directed Oxygen's legal and political programming.
Prior to joining Oxygen, Ms. Mills was Deputy Counsel to the President at the White House, where she supervised 35 attorneys and staff. Ms. Mills' legal experience also includes serving as Associate Counsel to the President, as Deputy General Counsel of the Clinton/Gore Transition Planning Foundation, and as an associate at the Washington, D.C. law firm of Hogan and Hartson where she represented various school districts seeking to implement the promises of Brown v. Board of Education. Ms. Mills received her Juris Doctor degree in 1990 from Stanford Law School, where she was elected to the Stanford Law Review. She received her Bachelor of Arts from the University of Virginia, where she graduated Phi Beta Kappa.
