Former NIDA Hubert H. Humphrey Drug Abuse Research fellow Alexandra Hill has been appointed Chancellor of the El Salvador Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Chancellor Hill was the first cabinet official announced by El Salvador’s President-Elect Nayib Bukele, who took office June 1. Ms. Hill accepted the appointment on Twitter, saying, "I receive with great responsibility and joy this appointment of the elected president @Nayibbukele. I am committed to the transformation of El Salvador. We are going to form a foreign policy of the new era for our country."
Following her 2005–2006 NIDA Humphrey Fellowship at Johns Hopkins University, Ms. Hill joined the Inter-American Drug Abuse Control Commission at the Organization of American States, where she worked on drug demand reduction and multidimensional security initiatives. In El Salvador, Ms. Hill founded the nongovernmental Anti-Drug Foundation of El Salvador and served as a member of the El Salvador National Public Safety Council, the National Drug Commission, and the National Council for Mental Health. She is co-author of the book, El Otro Rostro de la Paz, with Elizabeth Lira, executive director of the Chilean Institute of Mental Health and Human Rights. Ms. Hill received a bachelor’s degree in political science from Boston University and a master’s degree from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, where she specialized in public policy management, prevention of drug use and violence, and drug abuse treatment.