Victoria C. Gardner Coates is a cultural historian who received her Ph.D. in Italian Renaissance art from the University of Pennsylvania. Her work has appeared in The Sixteenth-Century Journal, Gazette des Beaux-Arts and Renaissance Studies. As the director of research in the office of Donald Rumsfeld, Dr. Coates provided editorial support for his best-selling memoir Known and Unknown. She has served as a senior fellow at the Commonwealth Foundation, an adjunct fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, and a consulting curator at the Cleveland Museum of Art. She is currently a senior staff member for national security at the United States Senate and the senior advisor for foreign policy for Ted Cruz's 2016 presidential campaign. Dr. Coates lives in Philadelphia with her husband, two children and two dogs.