Laura Stone is a Senior Advisor at DGA-Albright Stonebridge Group, a founding member of DGA Group, and is based in Washington, D.C and Palo Alto, California. She brings more than three decades of experience at the intersection of geopolitics, economic statecraft, and corporate diplomacy, advising clients on navigating complex political and commercial environments in China, across Asia, and throughout the Indo-Pacific.  

Ambassador Stone most recently served as U.S. Ambassador to the Republic of the Marshall Islands, where she oversaw more than $360 million in annual U.S. assistance while advancing regional security, infrastructure, and private-sector investment initiatives. She previously held senior leadership roles at the U.S. Department of State, including Deputy Assistant Secretary for China and Mongolia and Deputy Assistant Secretary for India, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka, directing policy, trade, and investment engagement across some of the world’s most strategically significant markets. As Deputy Coordinator for the Secretary of State’s Office of COVID-19 Response and Health Security, she helped negotiate and implement multinational frameworks uniting governments, multilateral institutions, and private industry to address pandemic supply chains and global health delivery.   

Earlier in her career, Ambassador Stone served in multiple overseas postings, including Beijing, Hanoi, Bangkok, and Tokyo, and held senior economic and trade roles spanning WTO accession, APEC negotiations, and regional infrastructure finance. She also served as China Policy Fellow at Stanford University, publishing and lecturing on U.S.–China relations, crisis response, and great-power competition.   

Ambassador Stone was a career member of the Senior Foreign Service. She holds a D.Phil. in international relations from Oxford University and a B.A. in government from Cornell University. She also speaks Mandarin Chinese.