Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall

Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall (born 1959) 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 (NATO, the EU, and the OSCE) to advance U.S. global interests.

Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall was nominated by President Barack Obama to be Deputy Secretary of Energy on July 8, 2014, and was confirmed by the United States Senate on September 18, 2014.

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.

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.