Elayne G. Whyte is the former vice-minister of foreign affairs of Costa Rica (2000-2002), and permanent representative of Costa Rica to the United Nations and other international organizations in Geneva (2014-2020). In 2017 she presided over the United Nations Conference that negotiated and adopted the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW), and from 2015–2018 she led other global negotiation processes to fill legal or cooperation gaps in the fields of human rights and global health at the World Health Organization. Elayne was a 2022 Fellow at the Advanced Leadership Initiative at Harvard University, and led the study group “The challenges of negotiating for humanity in the 21st century” at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government in fall 2022. She holds a master’s degree in International Policy Studies from the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey, California, and a BA in International Relations from the Universidad Autónoma de Centroamérica (Costa Rica).

Research interests: international security; nuclear diplomacy; human rights; United Nations; regional integration and international negotiations.