Kenton Thibaut
Kenton Thibaut is a senior resident China fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab (DFRLab), where she leads China programming for the Democracy + Tech Initiative, and a resident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Indo-Pacific Security Initiative (IPSI) at the Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security.
In this role, Thibaut serves as head of China research and principal investigator for projects analyzing China’s role in the global technology ecosystem and its foreign-policy priorities in the digital space.
Before joining the DFRLab, Thibaut spent five years in the private sector, specializing in Chinese government relations for multinational companies. Previously, she conducted research on Chinese elite politics at the Brookings Institution in Washington, DC.
Thibaut is a PhD candidate at Georgetown University, focusing on comparative cross-border data policy. She has received multiple research fellowships, including a Fulbright Fellowship, Blakemore Freeman Fellowship, and Boren National Security Fellowship. Thibaut is a security fellow at the Truman National Security Project and a term member of the Council on Foreign Relations.
She holds an MA in China studies and international economics from the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) and completed graduate studies in Chinese at the Hopkins-Nanjing Center in Nanjing, China. Thibaut is also an adjunct professor in Georgetown University’s Security Studies Program.
