Mariyam is Senior Policy Advisor in the Secretary of State’s Office of Diversity and Inclusion, under Ambassador Gina Abercrombie Winstanley. A foreign service office, Mariyam served in Washington Countering Violent Extremism, in the Office of International Religious Freedom in the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor. She previously served in Saudi Arabia and in New Delhi. In both posts, her focus was internal politics. Mariyam is fluent in several languages, including Arabic. Mariyam is a 2003 Mitchell Scholar. She read for an LLM in International Human Rights Law at the NUI Galway. Through her Irish Human Rights Commission work with Prof. Gerard Quinn, Mariyam became involved in drafting the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) at the UN in New York. After completing her JD at the UC Berkeley, Mariyam continued the human rights work she began in Ireland, working as a Legal Fellow on a Senate subcommittee on Human Rights and the Law and later managing government relations in the campaign for U.S. ratification of the CRPD. Blind herself, Mariyam envisions her role as being an envoy for the United States, reducing global misconceptions about the US, Muslim-Americans, and people with disabilities.