Richard Verma was the Assistant Secretary of State for Legislative Affairs, at the U.S. Department of State until March 2011. He was nominated by President Barack Obama in 2009. He is a lawyer with extensive experience in national security and nonproliferation issues. In 2014 he was nominated to become the next United States ambassador to India.

Verma’s parents hail from India, they lived through the partition of India and its fight for independence. His parents moved from India to the United States in the 1960s. His mother was born in west Punjab in British India and moved to east following the Partition of India. His father was the first literate person in his family. Verma’s father, Dr. Kamal Verma, was a professor of English, specializing in Indian Literature, at the University of Pittsburgh for 40 years and his late mother, Savitri Verma, was a special needs school teacher. Richard was the youngest of their five children, growing up in Western Pennsylvania.

He graduated from Georgetown University (LLM), Lehigh University (JD), and American University (BS). He then served in the U.S. Air Force, as an Air Force judge advocate.

He was a senior adviser to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid from 2002 to 2007. In 2008, he was a member of the Commission on the Prevention of WMD proliferation and terrorism.

He joined the State Department in 2007 as Assistant Secretary of State for Legislative Affairs. After leaving the State Department in 2011, he joined the Washington, D.C. office of Steptoe & Johnson as a senior counselor. He is currently a member of the Secretary of State's Foreign Affairs Policy Board.

In September 2014 Obama nominated Verma as the next U.S. Ambassador to India. The post had been vacant since the departure of Nancy Powell, during whose "disastrous" tenure Indian-American relations declined.

Political Foreign Policy, Ambassador,