Kenton Thibaut
Kenton Thibaut is a senior resident China fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab (DFRLab), where she leads China-related research and engagements in the Democracy + Tech Initiative.
In this capacity, she serves as head of China research and as principal investigator for projects examining China’s role in the global technology ecosystem and Chinese foreign-policy priorities vis-à-vis the digital domain.
Prior to joining DFRLab, she served for five years in the private sector working on Chinese government relations. Before this, she served as a research assistant at the Brookings Institution’s John L. Thornton China Center, where her research focused on Chinese elite politics.
Thibaut is a PhD candidate at Georgetown University, where she focuses on China’s role in the global information environment. She has received various research fellowships, including a Fulbright Fellowship, Blakemore Freeman Fellowship, and Boren National Security Fellowship. She was also named as a 2021 security fellow at the Truman National Security Project.
She holds an MA in international economics from Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, and completed a graduate certificate in Chinese studies at the Hopkins Nanjing Center in Nanjing, China. Thibaut also currently serves as an adjunct professor at Georgetown University’s Security Studies Program, where she coteaches a graduate-level course on global information operations.
