Rita Stephan is a Foreign Affairs Officer at the United States Department of State and a visiting researcher at the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies at Georgetown University. Before joining the State Department, she served as a survey statistician on Arab ancestries at the United States Census Bureau. She received her Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Texas at Austin with a Portfolio in Women’s and Gender Studies. She has published on Lebanese women’s movement, social media, social movements, social networks, and Arab-Americans. You can follow her on Twitter at @DrRatrout, Academia, and LinkedIn .