Rachel Van Horn is a Program Officer at the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a Congressionally funded non-profit in Washington, D.C. that supports democratic initiatives around the world. At the NED, Rachel works on the Eurasia Programs team, leveraging her extensive experience as a regional affairs specialist focused on Russia and the former Soviet Union. Rachel’s professional topics of interest include freedom of information and censorship in authoritarian contexts, the intersection of civil society and international security, as well as Russian regionalism and ethnic minority policy.

From 2012-2013, Rachel was a Fulbright Scholar in Astrakhan, Russia, where she returned in 2016 to conduct field work for her Master’s thesis on multicultural policy in contemporary Russia. Prior to her time at the NED, Rachel lived in Warsaw, Poland, working as the English Language Editor for a leading Polish media outlet and political research firm, Polityka Insight. Notably, Rachel oversaw the English language version of PI Climate, a special series that reported from the UN Global Climate Summit held in 2018 in Katowice, Poland. Rachel holds a Master’s degree in Russian, Eastern European, and Central Asian Regional Area Studies from Harvard University and a Bachelor’s degree in Political Studies and Russian & Eurasian Studies from Bard College in New York.