CISAC
Stanford University
Encina Hall
Stanford, CA 94305-6165

esherwood-randall@stanford.edu
(650) 725-9496 (voice)
(650) 725-0920 (fax)

Research Interests
national security; proliferation prevention; defense leadership and management; alliance relations; Europe, NATO and the European Union; the former Soviet Union; Central Asia; China

Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall is a senior research scholar at the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC) at Stanford University.  She is also the adjunct senior fellow for alliance relations at the Council on Foreign Relations, founding senior adviser to the Stanford-Harvard Preventive Defense Project, and a 2004 Carnegie Scholar. Her work focuses on American national security challenges, including preventing the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, defense leadership and management, and alliance politics.

Dr. Sherwood-Randall served as deputy assistant secretary of defense for Russia, Ukraine, and Eurasia during the first Clinton administration (1994–96). In this role, she developed and implemented regional security policy toward all the newly independent states of the former Soviet Union, including Russia, Ukraine, the Caucasus, and Central Asia, and established defense and military relationships with each of these states. She was instrumental in extending NATO’s Partnership for Peace program across Eurasia and in building the foundation for cooperation between Russia and NATO in the joint peacekeeping operation in Bosnia. For her work at the Pentagon, she was awarded the Department of Defense Distinguished Service Medal by then–Secretary of Defense William Perry. As a consultant, she has advised the Department of Defense and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.  In 2007-08 she has been a member of the Review Panel on Future Directions for Defense Threat Reduction Agency Missions and Capabilities to Combat Weapons of Mass Destruction.

Prior to her service in the Department of Defense, Dr. Sherwood-Randall was cofounder and associate director of Harvard University’s Strengthening Democratic Institutions Project. She also has served as chief foreign affairs and defense policy adviser to Senator Joseph R. Biden, Jr., and as a guest scholar in foreign policy studies at the Brookings Institution.

Dr. Sherwood-Randall is on the board of governors of the Commonwealth Club of California and on the Asia Society Policy Advisory Board. She is a member of the Aspen Strategy Group, the National Security Advisory Group to the Senate and House Democratic Leadership, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the International Institute for Strategic Studies. She is the author of two recent articles, "The Case for Alliances," in Joint Force Quarterly, and "Alliances and American National Security,” published by the U.S. Army War College Strategic Studies Institute, and the coauthor of the Council on Foreign Relations Special Report Generating Momentum for a New Era in U.S.-Turkey Relations, published in 2006.  She coauthored "The Case for Discriminate Force” in Survival in 2002, and  authored a chapter on "Managing the Pentagon's International Relations" in Keeping the Edge: Managing Defense for the Future, published by the MIT Press in 2001  She wrote Allies in Crisis: Meeting Global Challenges to Western Security, published by Yale University Press in 1990.

Dr. Sherwood-Randall received her Bachelor’s degree from Harvard College, magna cum laude, and a D.Phil. in international relations from Oxford University, where she was a Rhodes Scholar (California and Balliol, 1981).