Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall is the adjunct senior fellow for alliance relations at the Council on Foreign Relations. She is also a senior research scholar at the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC) at Stanford University, a senior adviser to the center’s 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. She has also served as a consultant to the Office of the Secretary of Defense and to the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

Prior to her government service, Dr. Sherwood-Randall was cofounder and associate director of Harvard University’s Strengthening Democratic Institutions Project. She previously 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 serves on the board of governors of the Commonwealth Club of California. She is a member of the Aspen Strategy Group, the National Security Advisory Group, the Council on Foreign
Relations, and the International Institute for Strategic Studies. She is the coauthor of the Council Special Report Generating Momentum for a New Era in U.S.-Turkey Relations, published in 2006, and of two additional 2006 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. She is also the coauthor of "The Case for Discriminate Force,” published in Survival in 2002. She 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, and she wrote Allies in Crisis: Meeting Global Challenges to Western Security, published by Yale University Press in 1990.

She 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).

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