NBC News' Chief Foreign Correspondent | Richard Engel | Talks at Google

After giving the 2015 Stanford University Commencement Speech on June 14, Richard Engel, NBC News' chief foreign correspondent visited Google the following day.

Engel is widely regarded as one of America’s leading foreign correspondents, having been the chief foreign correspondent for NBC News since 2008. He has covered wars, revolutions and political transitions around the world for nearly 20 years. He has just returned from Nepal, where he went to cover the devastating earthquake, which killed nearly 9,000 people.

In 2012, Engel and his crew were kidnapped for five days while covering the Syrian Civil War and psychologically tortured. Thankfully, all escaped and made it out alive.

Engel’s work has received numerous awards, including, most recently, his second Peabody award, for his coverage of the rise of ISIS. He has also won seven Emmy awards, an award of excellence from the Congressional Medal of Honor Society and the 2008 Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Award and the Medill Medal for Courage in Journalism, the first ever given to a broadcast journalist, for his report "War Zone Diary."

Engel has lived in the Middle East since graduating from Stanford University in 1996 with a B.A. in international relations. He speaks and reads fluent Arabic, which he learned while living in Cairo. He is also fluent in Italian and Spanish.

Engel is the author of two books, “A Fist in the Hornet’s Nest” and “War Journal: My Five Years in Iraq,” which chronicle his experiences covering the Iraq war. He is also fluent in Arabic, Italian and Spanish.