Bio
Peggy Knudson is vice president of development at NTI. In this role, she leads the Development team and is responsible for raising funds for the organization from individuals, governments, foundations, and corporations.
Peggy Knudson joined the Nuclear Threat Initiative as chief development officer in early 2018. She has more than 20 years of experience in fundraising and grantmaking, including at the Brookings Institution, where she was director of development for Foreign Policy; at the Center for American Progress, where she was senior vice president for development; at Friends of the Global Fight Against AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, where she was vice president for development; and at ecoAmerica, an organization dedicated to getting everyday Americans on board with climate solutions, where she was vice president for development and a member of the Executive Management Team.
Knudson started her career at the German Marshall Fund of the United States, where she was promoted to acting director of the Fund’s Berlin office in 1990 after the fall of the Berlin Wall. She has also been executive director of Women In International Security, an organization dedicated to promoting women as decision makers in foreign and defense affairs, and a marketing manager at the Treuhandanstalt, the German government agency that restructured and sold formerly state-owned East German companies in the 1990s.
Knudson has an M.A. in European Studies and Economics from the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) and a B.A. summa cum laude in Journalism and English from the University of North Dakota, Grand Forks. She is fluent in German.