By Greg Giroux, CQ Staff

Election: Defeated Rep. Thelma Drake , R

Residence: Norfolk

Born: Sept. 9, 1974; Philadelphia, Pa.

Religion: Presbyterian

Family: Single

Education: Georgetown U., B.S. 1996 (foreign service)

Career: International development government liaison; Foreign Service officer

Political highlights: No previous office

Think of a global hot spot, and chances are Nye has been there.

A former Foreign Service officer who later worked with the U.S. Agency for International Development, he has served in Kosovo, the West Bank, Afghanistan and most recently Iraq, where he worked for nine months in 2006 on a USAID program to help employ Iraqis.

The program essentially was “the economic part of the counterinsurgency effort,” he says.

He was in Baghdad’s Green Zone, and he says Iraq was by far the most dangerous place he ever served. “I slept with a set of body armor next to my bed, and a helmet,” he says.

Nye says he ran for Congress because “there is only so much one can do on the executing end of foreign policy in terms of advancing American interests, and there’s only so much you can do to influence the policy from the outside.”