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Sherwood-Randall's father, Richard E. Sherwood, was a senior partner in a Los Angeles law firm,[5][6] a patron of the arts in Los Angeles,[7] and a leader of the Asia Society and the Rand-UCLA Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies.[8] She has one brother, Ben Sherwood.[9] She received a bachelor's degree from Harvard University, and a doctorate in international relations[10] from Balliol College, Oxford, where she was a Rhodes Scholar.[11] She and her brother, Ben Sherwood, were the first sister and brother to win Rhodes Scholarships.[9]
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.[13] In the Clinton administration, from 1994 to 1996, Sherwood-Randall served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Russia, Ukraine, and Eurasia.[14] 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.[15] 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.[16]
White House roles
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.[17] 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.[18] 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.[17] 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.[19][20]
Deputy Secretary of Energy
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.[21] 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.[22] 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."[23] 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.[24][25]
Post-Obama administration
After the end of the Obama Administration, Dr. Sherwood-Randall served as a distinguished professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology, with joint appointments at the Nunn School of International Affairs and the Strategic Energy Institute.[26] She was also a senior fellow at Harvard Kennedy School of Government's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs.[27] During that time, she advised national laboratories, energy investment funds and start-ups.[28]
Sherwood-Randall was one of a handful of national security officials who participated in deliberations about the evacuation of Afghan refugees as the Taliban closed in on Kabul.[31] In August 2021, on the day before Kabul fell, Sherwood-Randall chaired a meeting of the National Security Council to discuss basic actions involved in a mass civilian evacuation. A leaked document Summary of Conclusions from that meeting suggests that facts on the ground were rapidly outstripping the administration's planning.[32]
A February 2022 60 Minutes segment featured Sherwood-Randall and Deputy National Security Advisor Anne Neuberger discussing threats to the American national electricity grid.[33]
Publications
She has published widely on national security issues, mainly on U.S alliances and nuclear proliferation.[34] 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.[35] 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.[36] Most recently, she published "The Age of Strategic Instability: How Novel Technologies Disrupt the Nuclear Balance", in the July 2020 edition of Foreign Affairs.[37]
Personal life
She is married to neurosurgeon Jeffrey Randall. They have two sons, Richard and William.[38]
