Claire Downing is a PhD candidate at George Mason Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter School for Peace and Conflict Resolution, whose research focuses on the deleterious effects of national security policies on local communities. She was the 2019 Human Rights Fellow at Young Professionals in Foreign Policy and her views on various human rights topics have been published in several online outlets. Downing currently serves as a program officer in a philanthropic role where she helps support a diverse field of Muslim, Arab and South Asian (MASA) organizations working to address profiling, discrimination, hate crimes, anti-Muslim bigotry and xenophobia in the United States.