Juliette N. Kayyem ’91, a lecturer in public policy at the Kennedy School of Government (KSG), was appointed Undersecretary of Homeland Defense for Massachusetts by Governor Deval L. Patrick ’78 last Wednesday.

Kayyem, who has a Lebanese-American father and Lebanese immigrant mother, is the only Arab-American to hold such a prominent position in any state’s homeland security department, according to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

“I’m having mixed emotions right now. I was not planning this,” Kayyem said in a telephone interview yesterday.

She will be the first person ever to serve in the role, which did not exist under any of Patrick’s predecessors.

In addition to graduating from the College in 1991, Kayyem received a degree from Harvard Law School in 1995. She joined the KSG faculty in 2001, and served as executive director of research of the school’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs until 2003.

Since then she has been a resident scholar, teaching on subjects including homeland security and U.S. law. She has also served as co-chair of a KSG program that works with the Dubai School of Government.

Kayyem will take office on Jan. 22, but she says she has no set agenda at the present time.

“A large part of the job is going to be the steep learning curve; I need time to figure out exactly what my docket is going to be,” she said. “I’ve been focusing in the national security world for so long, that focusing on the state stuff is new.”

Ames Professor of Law Philip B. Heymann, who co-authored the book “Protecting Liberty in an Age of Terror” with Kayyem, praised her qualifications for the post, saying “she’ll do a better job of it than anybody else in Massachusetts.”

“She’s extremely knowledgeable about terrorism, and has been working in the field extensively over the past few years,” he said. “She’s bound to be very influential, and raise the level of attention to the level of security measures for Boston and Massachusetts.”

Kayyem started her career in the U.S. Justice Department as a trial lawyer, litigating across the country.

Before entering law school, she worked as a journalist in South Africa, and has since appeared as an MSNBC news analyst.

She has maintained a strong interest in public policy, particularly as it relates to terrorism. She also worked as a legal adviser for former Attorney General Janet Reno.

“It sounds pathetic, and I don’t mean to get on the Barack Obama train, but I still remember what he said when he became the first black American to be president of the Harvard Law Review,” said Kayyem, a former Crimson reporter.

“He said that he had never understood why people from Harvard took such conventional routes after graduation, because if there was ever any group of people that could deal with a line of work outside the norm, it was them. He was telling us to try different things, and I followed his advice. I followed Deval,” she said.