Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall is an American national security expert and energy leader who served as the United States Deputy Secretary of Energy from October 2014 to January 20, 2017. Previously, she was White House Coordinator for Defense Policy, Countering Weapons of Mass Destruction, and Arms Control and, before that, Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for European Affairs since January 2009. As of August 2018, she is a Distinguished Professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology, with joint appointments at the Nunn School of International Affairs and the Strategic Energy Institute. She is also a Senior Fellow at Harvard Kennedy School of Government's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. She advises national laboratories, energy investment funds and start-ups. At the Department of Energy she launched a major initiative in partnership with leaders of the American electricity, oil and gas sectors to tackle emerging cyber and physical challenges to the power grid. Her White House Coordinator responsibilities included defense policy and budgeting; the DOD-DOE nuclear weapons enterprise; military sexual assault prevention; the Prague arms control agenda; and the destruction of Syria's declared chemical weapons. She served as the Presidential Sherpa for the Nuclear Security Summit in 2014, which mobilized actions to take fissile materials off the global playing field. As Senior Director for European Affairs, she focused on revitalizing America's unique network of alliance relationships and strengthening cooperation with 49 countries and three international institutions in Europe to advance U.S. global interests. From 1997 to 2008, she was Founding Senior Advisor of the Preventive Defense Project at Stanford University. In the Clinton administration, from 1994 to 1996, Sherwood-Randall served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Russia, Ukraine, and Eurasia.
Early life and education
Sherwood-Randall's father, Richard E. Sherwood, was a senior partner in a Los Angeles law firm, a patron of the arts in Los Angeles, and a leader of the Asia Society and the Rand-UCLA Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies. She has one brother, Ben Sherwood. She received a bachelor's degree from Harvard University, and a doctorate in international relations from Oxford University, where she was a Rhodes Scholar at Balliol College. She and her brother, Ben Sherwood, were the first sister and brother in the same family to win Rhodes Scholarships. Her Harvard roommate was future United States Secretary of Commerce, Penny Pritzker.
She has published widely on national security issues, mainly on U.S alliances and nuclear proliferation. Her first book, Allies in Crisis: Meeting Global Challenges to Western Security, looked at the history of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and described how it handled crises outside of Europe without weakening the organization. In 2006, she wrote Alliances and American National Security, which makes the case for modernizing U.S. alliances as a means to reach the nation's security goals.
Personal life
She is married to neurosurgeon Jeffrey Randall. They have two sons, Richard and William.
