Kyle M. Ballard is the Senior Coordinator for Reports and Political Affairs in the U.S. Department of State’s Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons (J/TIP), responsible for the production of the annual Trafficking in Persons Report and the U.S. Government’s bilateral diplomatic efforts to address modern slavery worldwide.

Prior to J/TIP, Kyle was the Strategic Planner at the U.S. Department of Defense’s Defense Security Cooperation Agency, which is responsible for the execution of U.S. security cooperation programs ranging from defense institution building to the annual transfer of more than $40 billion in defense equipment and service.

Kyle led a team in the Department of State’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor focused on sectarian tensions and religious freedom in the Middle East and North Africa, and for developing rights-based approaches to combating violent extremism. Before that, he countered conventional weapons proliferation in the Bureau of Political Military Affairs, where he engaged in end-use monitoring of U.S. defense exports and partnered with various government agencies and international organizations to investigate front companies and criminal networks.

Kyle was a graduate research assistant at the Monterrey Terrorism Research and Education Program (MonTREP) and the Center for Nonproliferation Studies, and has also held positions in NGOs, the private sector, and at the United Nations focused on transitional crime, international security, and human rights. He is a graduate of Occidental College in Los Angeles, the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey, and George Mason University’s computational social science program.