From 2009-2011 she served as Director of Policy Planning for the United States Department of State, the first woman to hold that position. Upon leaving the State Department she received the Secretary's Distinguished Service Award, the highest honor conferred by the State Department, for her work leading the Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review. She also received a Meritorious Honor Award from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). Dr. Slaughter is a frequent contributor to both mainstream and new media, publishing op-eds in major newspapers, magazines and blogs around the world and curating foreign policy news for over 8,000 followers on Twitter. She appears regularly on CNN, the BBC, NPR, and PBS, lectures widely, and has served on boards of organizations ranging from the Council of Foreign Relations and the New America Foundation to the McDonald's Corporation and the Citigroup Economic and Political Strategies Advisory Group. Foreign Policy magazine named her to their annual list of the Top 100 Global Thinkers in 2009 and 2010.

Prior to her government service, Dr. Slaughter was the Dean of Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs from 2002-2009, where she rebuilt the School's international relations faculty and created a number of new centers and programs. She has written or edited six books, including A New World Order (2004) and The Idea That Is America: Keeping Faith with Our Values in a Dangerous World (2007), and over 100 articles. She was also the convener and academic co-chair, with Professor John Ikenberry, of the Princeton Project on National Security, a multi-year research project aimed at developing a new, bipartisan national security strategy for the United States. From 1994-2002, Dr. Slaughter was the J. Sinclair Armstrong Professor of International, Foreign, and Comparative Law and Director of the International Legal Studies Program at Harvard Law School. She received a B.A. from Princeton, an M.Phil and D.Phil in international relations from Oxford, where she was a Daniel M. Sachs Scholar, and a J.D. from Harvard. She is married to Professor Andrew Moravcsik; they live in Princeton with their two sons.