Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall

From January 1986 to September 1987, she served as principal advisor on all foreign and defense policy matters to then-Senator Joseph R. Biden, at the time ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and Chairman of the Subcommittee on European Affairs.[12] In the Clinton administration, from 1994 to 1996, Sherwood-Randall served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Russia, Ukraine, and Eurasia.[13] During this period, she led the effort to denuclearize three former Soviet states, for which she was awarded the Department of Defense Medal for Distinguished Public Service and the Nunn-Lugar Trailblazer Award.[14] From 1997 to 2008, she was a Founding Principal of the Harvard-Stanford Preventive Defense Project.  She was also a senior research scholar at Stanford University's Center for International Security and Cooperation from 2000 to 2008.[15]

During the first term of Barack Obama, Dr. Sherwood-Randall served as Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for European Affairs on the White House National Security Council.[16] Her focus areas in that role were 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.[17]At the start of Obama's second term, she served as Special Assistant to the President and White House Coordinator for Defense Policy, Countering Weapons of Mass Destruction, and Arms Control.[16] 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.[18][19]

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.[20] 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.[21] She placed significant emphasis on low-carbon power, stating in a 2016 address that "We need to accelerate the transition to a low-carbon economy and spur innovation and science and technology ... so that we can power the world with low-carbon power."[22] Sherwood-Randall noted in a Council on Foreign Relations speech in 2016 that an "all of the above" energy strategy meant clean energy and carbon capture and storage for fossil fuels.[23] [24]

As of August 2018, she was a distinguished professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology, with joint appointments at the Nunn School of International Affairs and the Strategic Energy Institute.[25]  She is also a senior fellow at Harvard Kennedy School of Government's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs.[26] She advises national laboratories, energy investment funds and start-ups.[27]

In November 2020, Sherwood-Randall was a candidate for Secretary of Energy in the Biden administration.[28] In January 2021, she was named as Joe Biden’s Homeland Security Advisor.[2]