Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall

Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall (born 1959) has been serving as the United States Deputy Secretary of Energy since October 2014. 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.
Among her duties as White House Coordinator was leading the U.S. response to destroy the declared Syrian stockpiles of chemical weapons during the Syrian Civil War. As Senior Director for European Affairs, she focused on revitalizing America’s unique network of alliance relationships and strengthening cooperation with Europe to advance the Obama agenda.
From 1997 to 2008, she was Founding Senior Advisor of the Prevent 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.

Sherwood-Randall's father, Richard E. Sherwood, was a senior partner in a Los Angeles law firm, a long-standing patron of the arts in Los Angeles, a prominent member of international affairs organizations like the Asia Society and the Rand-UCLA Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, and long time leader of the American Jewish Committee. 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 brother sister team of Rhodes scholars.

Her Harvard roommate was future United States Secretary of Commerce, Penny Pritzker.

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 18 September 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.

She is married to neurosurgeon Jeffrey Randall. They have two sons, Richard and William.